Bibliographic entry (nonfiction):

Savas, E. S. 1982 Privatizing the Public Sector: How to Shrink Government. Chatham, New Jersey: Chatham House.

This is the classic book outlining the rationale and approaches for converting public enterprises and services into fee-based enterprises.

Even if Y2K is only moderate in impact, it is likely that governments at all levels will experience fiscal stress as tax revenues decline due to at least a mild recession . . . or worse. We also now have good reason to expect that Y2K remediation efforts for the public sector will lag far behind and be less successful than the efforts of the private sector. In the aftermath of Y2K, it is likely that a significant number of government agencies providing goods and services to the public will be damaged or non-functional. It can already be argued that governments are trying to do too much with too little, and their position will be much worse after Y2K hits. It will therefore be imperative that government prune away the non-essentials, and focus its limited resources on those few tasks which it MUST do.

But what, then, is to become of all the other things which government is presently doing, things which may be important to the functioning of society but are dead in the water? One good answer might be to privatize as many functions as possible, and let them pay for themselves by charging user fees to recover their operating costs.

-- Stefan Stackhouse (stefans@mindspring.com), August 14, 1999