RTFA: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/0…

President and emperor, America and Rome: the matchup is by now so familiar, so natural, that you just can’t help yourself-it comes to mind unbidden, in the reflexive way that the behavior of chimps reminds you of the behavior of people. Everyone gets it whenever a comparison of Rome and America is drawn-for instance, the offhand allusion to welfare and televised sports as “bread and circuses,” or to illegal immigrants as “barbarian hordes.” If reference is made to an “imperial presidency,” or to the deployment abroad of “American legions,” no one raises an eyebrow and wonders what you could possibly be talking about. Invoke the phrase “decline and fall” and thoughts turn simultaneously to the Roman past and the American present.

To be sure, a lot of Rome-and-America comparisons are glib, and if you’re looking for reasons to brush parallels aside, it’s easy enough to find them. The two entities, Rome and America, are dissimilar in countless ways. But some parallels really do hold up, though maybe not the ones that have been most in the public eye. Think less about decadence, less about military might-and think more about the parochial way these two societies view the outside world, and more about the slow decay of homegrown institutions. Think less about threats from unwelcome barbarians, and more about the powerful dynamics of a multi-ethnic society. Think less about the ability of a superpower to influence everything on earth, and more about how everything on earth affects a superpower.

“The Sack of Washington” is a stimulating meditation on the balance between public and private interests, and the resulting public outcomes. Other words used to describe the same forces are “privatization” and “deregulation” – which are both hot topics at the moment. The argument generally runs that private companies, due to competitive forces, will perform any public job more efficiently than a public office ever could, as measured in terms of cost and the quality of product. It is implied that public desires will be proxied as demand, and that companies will remain accountable through their dependence on the public as “customers.”

Of course, private companies can evade accountability from time to time, such as with Telecom Immunity, passed as part of FISA legislation, that had the effect of dismissing dozens of lawsuits concerning widespread domestic wiretapping. Private companies can also deliver an inferior product, such as with Halliburton/KBR’s mismanagement of US Military laundry and food services, or Enron’s manipulation of the California energy market. Market forces cannot always hold private companies accountable, such as the current situation involving over-valued home mortgages, which will be purchased by the Treasury with public funds for more than their market value.

All of the previously mentioned forces can interact, such as with the privatization of electronic voting machines through Diebold and Sequoia, which results in the short-circuiting of a critical feedback mechanism: democracy. Is there a free market solution to this problem? Is Diebold truly incapable of delivering a product that satisfies the requirement of creating a paper receipt?

Clearly, there is no such rule that privatization always increases the public good. On the same coin, there are countless examples of public waste and excess. Consider any instance of public servants using public resources for private purposes: public airplanes for personal business, public time for personal vacations, or public office for personal enrichment.

Although it’s frequently argued in the United States that we cannot possibly make everything public, it’s less frequently argued that we cannot make everything private. In fact, the reverse is frequently argued: we actually CAN make everything private. Arguing from such extreme poles makes for a great discussion, but it’s clear that in practice, a more moderate balance is required for society to perform efficiently.

By framing “efficiency” in different terms, it is possible to make the public or the private alternative appear to be superior. A publicly managed resource that is slower and more expensive than the private alternative can still be more efficient if it maintains accountability to the public, and is faster to respond to public criticism. The publicly managed resource might “last” longer, thereby reducing costs at the scale of years or decades.

In a managed economy such as in the United States, numerous extra-market forces manipulate the ultimate cost of goods. Although cost is a useful proxy for efficiency, cost is not equivalent to efficiency. Especially in a time defined by accounting scandals, where the root motivation is to misrepresent cost, “cost” cannot be used as the sole argument for privatization.

“The Sack of Washington” is an excerpt from Cullen Murphy’s book, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America.