The Myth of Capitalism:

Private run businesses are always more efficient than public run services, right? That's capitalisms great myth. Government workers have no profit motive to drive them toward efficiency.

Well, think again. One of the big scams of recent decades has been that privately run prisons are more efficient than publicly run ones. The truth is that this is simply not true. The only thing that private prisons are efficient at doing is redistributing the public wealth by funneling it into a few private hands.

In Arizona, a beacon of Republican mythology about capitalism, studies show that housing a prisoner in a private facility costs the same as doing so in a public one at best and sometimes as much as $1,600 per year more (Richard Oppel).

The truth is that those who advocate privatization of traditionally publicly run services have no interest in efficiently running these programs. Their sole interest is in moving taxpayer dollars into private pockets.