Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  The people of Lepcis were not disposed to tolerate this affront. Lepcis was a rich and significant metropolis—the birthplace of the emperor Septimius Severus. If Libya ever succeeds in jump-starting a tourist industry, it will owe much to this city’s magnificent seaside remains. The citizens immediately sent deputies to the emperor Valentinian, in Trier; perhaps the audience was held in the great imperial basilica, built by Constantine, that still stands in the city center. The emperor decided to dispatch a trusted aide named Palladius to Africa to investigate; and with Palladius he also sent a large sum of money to pay the army’s wages. But, as Gibbon writes, “the rigid impartiality of Palladius was easily disarmed.” Upon arrival in Lepcis, he decided to keep some of the money for himself. Count Romanus found out, and used this as leverage to influence the report Palladius carried back to the emperor. The count was exonerated, and several of his accusers—upright and truthful men—were executed. Two others had their tongues cut out.

  Because Romanus had escaped justice, he remained in good standing as the military commander of Africa. Ten years went by, and during that time his extortionary actions fed a revolt by a Moorish leader and client prince named Firmus. The revolt was so serious that the emperor had to send Theodosius, the army’s magister militum, or chief of staff, to Africa to put it down. To obtain the legions to accomplish this, Theodosius borrowed from the Roman forces on the Danube, leaving that critical frontier weakened and exposed. Not surprisingly, barbarian tribes exploited the opportunity and invaded Roman territory.

  In Africa, Theodosius removed Count Romanus from command and quashed the rebellion. He also made a discovery: among the count’s papers Theodosius found documents showing that Palladius had lied to the emperor ten years earlier. Palladius was arrested in Italy, and sensibly committed suicide while on his way to face Valentinian in Trier.

  Looking back, let’s consider the calculus of corruption: the actions of one greedy soldier and one greedy bureaucrat together caused serious breaches of public order on two frontiers. Now imagine this way of doing business extended empire-wide. Imagine it encompassing everyone, from farmers and craftsmen up through local magistrates and imperial governors. Imagine it going on for a hundred or two hundred years. Thus, for instance, by the fifth century A.D. unit commanders are routinely sending inflated rosters to headquarters for payment on the basis of head count, keeping the difference for themselves. Soldiers are allowed to go away on leave and then disperse into the civilian populace, but are kept on the rosters. The on-paper size of the army is vast; the true size is smaller—and in fact unknowable. That army needs supplies—boots, olive oil, iron—and from source to destination the supplies are skimmed and sold, causing shortages down the line and sometimes mutiny. It had once been customary, when accepting barbarians into the empire as foederati, to demand troops from them in return, in order to augment the empire’s dwindling stocks of manpower. Why not just take cash instead? This approach was certainly favored by those who would handle the money. But it made the military no larger.

  The People’s Business, Inc.

  IN THE END, Rome was heading toward something the Romans couldn’t, by definition, have a term for. But we do: it’s the Middle Ages. The precise definition of “feudalism” is one of those things on which medievalists can’t quite agree—the field is divided into warring fiefdoms—but the historian F. L. Ganshof discerned in feudal society one basic quality: “a dispersal of political authority amongst a hierarchy of persons who exercise in their own interest powers normally attributed to the state.” In other words, the public interest had become private.

  This isn’t the place for an extended excursion across a thousand years of Western history. In brief, for many centuries power was wielded in Europe by monarchs and vassals as if it were a form of private property. The levying of taxes, the raising of armies, the meting out of justice—these things were done in the name of the ruler, and the fruits of his administration were enjoyed by those who acknowledged the ruler’s personal lordship. The eventual path away from the Middle Ages was marked by the halting emergence of governments defined by communal interest rather than private prerogative. Power was no longer justified as simply a form of property. Social services and protections, and your rights as a person, became consequences of citizenship, not of a deal between a magnate and his underlings, or between a private entity and its clients. America came into being toward the tail end of this process; the Mayflower Compact straddles old and new, beginning with a pious nod to the king but then going on to set up a “civill Body Politick” effectively without one, which America as a whole would emphatically do a century and a half later. To most modern eyes, the general tendency described here—away from power as private property and toward power as public authority—has been seen in a positive light: evolution’s arrow was pointing the way it should.

  But sometime in the late twentieth century the arrow began changing direction. It began indicating a deflection of power back into private hands. Privatization today sometimes makes itself felt in ways that would have turned no heads in ancient Rome. It of course still includes influence peddling and bribery and the buying and selling of public office. Representative Randy (“Duke”) Cunningham, now in jail, infamously drafted a “bribe menu” on official stationery, linking the size of defense contracts he would deliver with the size of payments he received. Representative Bob Ney, implicated in the Abramoff scandals, has left Congress, having been warned by his majority leader that if he stayed he “could not expect a lucrative career on K Street”—that is, he would jeopardize any future as a suffragator. And as in Rome, privatization still includes turning over government departments to incompetent cronies, empowering private individuals at the expense of public intentions. The leadership of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which proved unable to cope with the Hurricane Katrina disaster, is only the most prominent instance.

  But the dominant form of privatization today is something relatively new, at least in its dimensions. Government on its stupendous modern scale—regulating every industry; redistributing treasure from one sector of society to another; forecasting the weather and engineering the genome; reaching bureaucratically into every intimate cranny of life—simply did not exist in ancient Rome. Because the extent of government is larger, privatization has more scope. Its most pervasive form is perfectly legal: the hiring of profit-making companies by the thousands to do government jobs, and sometimes the wholesale reflagging of government agencies into private or semiprivate companies. The ostensible motives may be pure, but the effect in every case is to insert an independent agent, with its own interests to consider and protect, into the space between public will and public outcome—a dynamic that represents a potential “diverting of government force” far more systemic and insidious than outright venality.

  Privatization along these lines has occurred most decisively in America and Britain. In 1976 a book was published in the United States called The Shadow Government; its subtitle spoke ominously of “the government’s multi-billion-dollar giveaway” of decision-making authority. In tone the book comes across today like a print version of old newsreel footage: a portentous voiceover signals urgency as jackbooted storm troopers occupy the Ruhr. Government agencies, the authors warned, were farming out various functions to high-priced consultants, secretive think tanks, and corporate vested interests—accountable to no one! And “outsourcing” was not the only issue. Some parts of the government, they went on, might even be sold off completely—turned into private businesses! The process was “cloaked in contractual and other formal approvals by the various executive departments,” but make no mistake: it amounted to nothing less than a “drive to merge Government and business power to the advantage of the latter.”

  A little more than a decade later, the shadow government was out of the shadow. There is a plausible rationale for privatization—one that often makes sense in the short run and for specific tasks. Private contractors may be able to operate mor
e efficiently than government agencies do. Marketplace signals may prove to be more direct and powerful than bureaucratic ones. And why shouldn’t the government hire outside specialists for help with certain chores, the way any household or business does? In the 1980s Ronald Reagan created a presidential commission on privatization to study not how the boundary between public and private might be bolstered but how it could be pushed out of the way even further, to give private interests more opportunity to move in. The same idea surfaces in the “reinventing government” movement taken up by the Clinton administration: “We would do well,” one expert advised, “to glory in the blurring of public and private and not keep trying to draw a disappearing line in the water.” Since then privatization has affected every aspect of American public life. It has also moved beyond narrowly defined tasks to embrace broad government functions. (It even seems to be crossing from the temporal realm into the spiritual one: because of a shortage of Catholic priests in America, requests for prayers made by Americans in their local churches are now being outsourced to Catholic priests in India, with a portion of the original donation remitted overseas.)

  As noted, the most visible surge in government outsourcing has come in the realm of the military. In The Soldier and the State, written only half a century ago, Samuel Huntington observed, “While all professions are to some extent regulated by the state, the military profession is monopolized by the state.” He could not write that sentence today. But it’s not just the military; every facet of personal “security”—one of the basic elements of the social contract—is increasingly in the hands of private business. It was not until the nineteenth century that America’s urban governments, by setting up local police forces, managed to make an ordinary person’s daily safety a matter of real public responsibility. This was a major advance, though perhaps temporary. No one with money relies on such guarantees any longer (nor did they in Rome, where police forces as we know them were virtually nonexistent). More and more people have withdrawn into protected enclaves, a Latin American innovation successfully transplanted north. Private security is a major growth industry; in 1960 there were far more police officers than hired security guards in America, whereas today private guards outnumber the police by a margin of 50 percent. Individuals may owe nominal allegiance to a town or a state, but their true oath of fealty is to Securitas or Guardsmark.

  One of the chief obligations of any government is simply to dispense justice—to resolve disputes, oversee legal business, mete out punishment. These functions were once held in private hands. After a stint as a public responsibility they are now migrating back. Lawyers and clients increasingly shun the civil courts—congested, expensive, fickle—and instead buy themselves some private arbitration, provided by a growing cadre of profitable “rent-a-judge” companies. As for the criminal-justice system, those sentenced to prison may very well do their time in a private facility, run on behalf of state and federal governments and operated by a company with some former public official in its management to grease the wheels. Faced with rising numbers of inmates (largely a consequence of “three strikes and you’re out” laws), and unwilling to raise taxes to build more public prisons, governments at all levels have found that the easy, cost-effective way is to turn the prison industry over to the private sector: to a behemoth like the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, or to one of many smaller companies. All but four states have contracted out some elements of their prison systems to private companies. Entrepreneurs known as “bed-brokers” help move prisoners from crowded facilities in one state to less-crowded ones in other states. In Rome, private companies sprang up to provide for the torture and crucifixion of troublesome slaves, relieving estate owners of the need to deal with the matter themselves. Crucifixion is one penal market niche that American companies have not sought to exploit.

  America’s public colleges and universities are fast losing their public character. These institutions were created under the terms of an act signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, which provided federal land grants to the states as a basis for public financing of higher education. But state support is diminishing. Nationwide, state legislatures are picking up only about two thirds of the annual cost of public higher education. For the University of Illinois, the figure is 25 percent. For the University of Michigan, it’s 18 percent. The president of Penn State has warned of a “slow slide toward privatization.” What makes up the difference in funding? To some degree, higher tuition. But even more it’s money from private donors and private corporations, creating an incipient “academic-industrial complex” at public and private institutions alike. You can’t escape the signs, whether small and symbolic or large and concrete (and brick and steel). At the University of California at Berkeley, one administrator is officially known as the BankAmerica Dean of the Haas School of Business. Most of the funding for Harvard’s Center for Risk Analysis, which studies public-health issues related to food and the environment, comes from private industry, including chemical and pesticide manufacturers. Rice University has a Ken Lay Center for the Study of Markets in Transition, endowed by the late former chairman of Enron. Much money for universities comes with strings attached—most important, the power to push research in certain directions and perhaps away from others, and the ownership of patents deriving from sponsored research. The confusion between what’s public and what’s private starts with institutional self-interest and runs down through the interests of all the individuals involved. A professor at Wayne State University, who holds a chair in marketing that bears the Kmart name, is unabashed in his embrace of the patron-client relationship: “Kmart’s attitude has always been: What did we get from you this year? Some professors would say they don’t like that position, but for me, it’s kept me involved with a major retailer, and it’s been a good thing.”

  Sociologists have a term for what is occurring: they call it the “externalization of state functions.” Water and sewage systems are being privatized, and public hospitals and public-health programs. Voucher programs and charter schools are a way of shifting education toward the private sector. The protection of nuclear waste is in private hands. Meat inspection is done largely by the meatpacking companies themselves. Americans were up in arms when they learned that Dubai Ports World, a company in the United Arab Emirates, would soon be in control of the terminals at half a dozen major U.S. seaports—only to discover that terminal operations at virtually all American ports had long ago been privatized, and that 80 percent of them were already operated by foreign companies, the largest of which is Chinese. Serious proposals to privatize portions of Social Security have been on the table, and they will doubtless appear there again. One effect that privatizing Social Security would surely have is to encourage the affluent to opt out into private accounts to the greatest degree possible, eroding the communal sense of solidarity (as FDR understood) that has been the program’s mainstay. Meanwhile, the new Medicare prescription-drug plan effectively puts an enormous government program into the hands of private insurance and drug companies. Those inclined toward dystopian fantasy should consider Bruce Sterling’s futuristic novel Holy Fire. It conjures a society in which people are so beholden to private employers for the medical benefits that bring increasingly potent health care that they will do anything to avoid losing a job and therefore losing coverage—leading to a gradual re-emergence of slavery in fact if not in name.

  Many services that used to be provided free of charge now must be paid for—government by user fee. Detailed statistical data from the Census Bureau and other agencies was once available to everyone; now it’s being sold, mainly for marketing purposes, and often at prices that only private corporations can afford. The vaults of the Smithsonian were once open to documentary filmmakers regardless of provenance and financing. Now an agreement between the Smithsonian and the cable company Showtime has created something called the Smithsonian Networks, which will have jurisdiction over, and priority access to, certain kinds of material. The document
ary maker Ken Burns says of the deal, “It feels like the Smithsonian has essentially optioned America’s attic to one company.” State governments across the country are selling off such public assets as airports, highways, and even state lotteries to private companies, or handing them over under long-term leases.

  Is there any government function that can’t be transferred to some private party? A considerable amount of tax collection is now done, in effect, by casinos; rather than raise taxes to pay for services, legislatures legalize gambling and then take a rake-off, maybe earmarked for education or highways, from the profits earned by private casino companies. It’s “tax farming” for the modern age, recalling the hated Roman practice of selling the right to collect taxes to private individuals (including the apostle Matthew in the Gospels) who were then allowed to keep anything over what they had agreed to remit to the government. (Allowing citizens to pay the IRS with credit cards amounts to the backdoor creation of another form of tax farming: credit-card companies turn into the government’s tax collectors and reap a percentage of the tax paid until that credit-card debt is cleared.) As the recent revelations about torture have made clear, even official interrogations for national-security purposes have been outsourced—in this instance to other countries through the process known as “extraordinary rendition.” The sale of naming rights for public facilities and other amenities attracts notice mostly for the ungainly nomenclature that results—mutants like the Mitsubishi Wild Wetland Trail, at the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, and the Whataburger Field, in Corpus Christi. But it’s also a sign of creeping privatization, as corporations, the Agrippas of our era, provide the kind of investment that the public purse can’t or won’t. Thus, to attract more corporate underwriting, the Department of the Interior has proposed that America’s national parks be liberally opened up to the sale of naming rights. No one is suggesting that there will soon be a Weyerhaeuser Redwood National Park or a J. Crew Cape Cod National Seashore. But might there be a Fujifilm El Capitan Scenic Vista? A Sherwin-Williams Painted Desert Trailhead?