GovExec: IRS Privatizing Tax Collection

By Melinda Barton

Thursday, March 02, 2006 at 03:47 PM

Is the government really this corrupt? Yes, it is. Despite the fact that privatizing debt collection for our nation's taxes will cost much more, pose a grave threat to privacy, and be far less efficient than governmental collection, the IRS is set to sign contracts with private companies to do their dirty work.

The eventual dissolution of all government in favor of the privatization of all social functions has long been part of the "utopian" dream of the laissez-faire capitalist. From placing governmental agencies in the hands of the industries they're supposed to regulate to massive deregulation to corporate welfare/giveways to the privatization plans for Social Security and IRS debt collection to the untrammeled war profiteering that has led to the American taxpayer/soldier getting the shaft to the outsourcing of vital operations to companies run by foreign governments, George W. Bush has been the profit mongers' wildest wet dream.

For anyone familiar with the history of laissez-faire capitalism and the horrid abuses wrought in the name of profit, this dream is a nightmare of dystopic proportions. We'll get to pay more for less. We'll watch horrified as our personal information is sold willy-nilly to not just the highest bidder, but thousands of bidders. We'll watch all of the protections we've come to take for granted disappear in a cloud of lung-scarring smoke. Security will be a thing of the past, a cute bedtime story we'll tell our granchildren. And all this will be wrought by people who are completely unaccountable to the American people, even the comforting illusion of governmental accountability will be lost.

We need a new generation of muckrakers to show the American people what goes on behind the closed doors hiding our future masters, the capitalist pigs dining at the taxpayers' trough. Lacking that, we need to remind people of the work of the old muckrakers like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Stefens, and Upton Sinclair. Their investigations of capitalism's worst abuses led to protections such as unemployment insurance, workplace safety protections, workman's compensation, social security, labor negotations, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the FDA, media regulation, the Environmental Protection Agency, consumer rights, recalls of dangerous products, corporate accountability for faulty products, fraud legislation, anti-trust laws, etc. etc. etc. We must do it now. Lest they and our way of life be forgotten.