When your epistemic bubble keeps telling you the government is evil and the private sector can do no wrong, you get shit like this:
[Serena Bumpus, regional director of nursing for the Austin Round Rock Region of Baylor Scott and White Health in Texas,] has fielded calls from nurses all over the country — some as far afield as the United Kingdom — wanting to know how they can help. But Bumpus says she does not have an easy answer.
“I’ve had to kind of just do my own digging and use my connections,” she said. At first, she said, interested nurses were asked to register through the Texas Disaster Volunteer Registry; but then the system never seemed to be put to use.
Later she learned — “by happenstance … literally by social media” — that the state had contracted with private agencies to find nurses. So now she directs callers to those agencies. [WaPo]
This was a prime role for the government to fill, and it appears to have been completely abdicated in Texas by the dollar-worshipping leaders of government. Think about it: she learned about it by accident.
That is unacceptable. But you can guess there’s more than one instance of that out there. The private sector has no experience and no motivation – but profit – with this situation.
This is the result of decades of preaching about the evils of government by the right, and the assertions, some very, very silly – I know, I read them when they were initially published – that the private sector can do darn near anything the government can do, ten times better and without corruption.
All of these are turning out to be lies. If my dear reader has bought into these assertions, this is the time to sit back in your chair and contemplate how they went wrong. Or go here (one of my personal prisms). Methods optimized for one sector of society rarely transfer to another. We’re seeing that in practice right now – especially the Southern states run by Republicans.
