There are many, of course, but one of the most enduring is of the superiority of the private sector, which is more nimble/flexible/adaptable than bloated government bureaucracy and hence can deliver superior services for a fraction of the money. To be fair, this hoary fraud has been trotted out by both Democrats and Republicans over the past 20 years, to the point where refuting it borders on heresy. Of course, anyone who has actually worked in the private sector for more than ten minutes knows that the notion is utter bullshit---the mission of the private sector isn't to provide equivalent services for less money, it's to provide services for more money because that's how you maximize shareholder value:
Average teacher pay last school year was under $57,000, but the highest-paid educator the taxpayers support earned $9.5 million last year. Those big bucks went to Nathaniel A. Davis, the chief executive officer and chairman of the board of K12 Inc., which runs virtual privatized schools for taxpayers.---Baron VWhat of garbage removal, the stinky work of burly men whose wages Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to get modestly increased back in 1968 when he was murdered in Memphis? These days, you can haul in $7.7 million a year in garbage. That big payday went to David Steiner, CEO of Waste Management, who also owns about $59 million worth of stock in the company that contracts to pick up garbage for cities, towns and counties, but also has private-pay customers.
And how about prison guards? Newspapers often run stories on how some guards rack up overtime to make more than $100,000 a year. But pay in this field can range as high as $6 million. That is what GEO Corporation paid CEO George Zoley in 2012. GEO operates jails and prisons with about 77,000 beds that, it boasts to shareholders, are occupied 96 percent of the time with inmates---adult and juvenile.
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