You may have heard the president use the term “Public-Private partnership” (PPP or P3) before. What the heck was he talking about?
We’ll start with the definition. The AGC says, “There is no single definition of a P3." Thanks for reading. See you next week. 😊
I couldn’t find a defined definition of it but generally it means the public, meaning the government, and the private, meaning corporations, getting together to further the aspirations of one or the other. This could be the private going to the public or the public going to the private. The bottom line it means the 2 working together.
A recent example is the government wanting to develop a vaccine very quickly for a virus that was quickly spreading through the population that the doctors didn’t know how to treat because it was new, or as doctors like to say, novel. The government tried to reduce the red tape the drug companies had to normally go through to get a product to the market to treat the virus. I won’t be getting into why the red tape was there and thinking that it was there for a reason in the past. So far this sounds pretty good. Git ‘er done because people are dying, right?
When you have such large organizations like the government, the potential for it going off the rails is pretty high. Name 1 thing the government does well at a reasonable cost.
The question is, “How far should this go?” In the United States we have this little document that the government has to adhere to called, The Constitution. This document limits how far the power of the government extends. This is a legal question, not how you personally feel about it. The founding fathers understood what a democracy was and purposely chose to not set the United States up as one. A democracy is when the majority rules. A republic establishes a set of laws that everyone has to adhere to regardless of the majority or someone’s feelings. In short it protects the minority over the majority. The reason they did this is because they knew that most people don’t have time in their lives to deal with the government. They must work to survive. So, they set the country up as a representative republic where we elect representatives to represent out interest in the government with a vote like a democracy. So that said, let’s continue.
Last year the government tried to create a rule saying all federal contractors had to require all its employees be vaccinated. The penalty for not complying was the government would cancel their contract with the company. The government created 4 mandates in total trying to force the people to get a vaccine, because the constitution limits their power to mandate the population get the vaccine. In a federal court case brought on by the states to stop the department called OSHA from mandating the vaccine, the judge cited a tweet by the president’s chief of staff that said and I’m paraphrasing here, “we found a workaround to the constitution to mandate the vaccine.” The judge said there is no work around to the constitution and ordered that the mandate was to be halted.
Back to the topic. Even though the mandate by the government was ordered to stop, many companies have chosen to implement the mandate as a company policy. They are saying the constitution has no authority over them as it is to limit government powers not what a company can do. That is also an example of public private partnership. The private sector is doing what the public sector cannot do by law.
Think about this, right now you may be in favor of the vaccine mandate. You are happy to see them do this. But what if they decide to make it a company policy that you cannot have more than 1 child (China). Or they mandate all employees drive electric cars. This is what is called a slippery slope. What will or can you do if they try to push something you don’t like? At what point does this country go from capitalism to socialism? The current administration is already talking about taking over public marketplaces like pharmaceuticals. I remember after 9/11 a politician wanted to create the TSA to try and stop hijackers from getting on planes. His statement was, “You can’t professionalize until you federalize.” The next step after socialism is fascism. If you look up those 2 words, they say socialism is far left and fascism if far right. That is not true the scale goes from no government to total government. Anarchism -> capitalism -> socialism -> fascism. All the isms. If you don’t have physical control of your own body, do you really have freedom?
What do you think? Is PPP good or bad? Should the government be that involved with private organizations? Where do we draw the line?
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