But I do think that it is a particular byproduct of our contemporary cult of privatization: the sense that what is private, what is paid for, is somehow better for just that reason. This is an inversion of a common assumption in the first two thirds of the century, certainly the middle fifty years from the 1930s to the 1980s: that certain goods could only be properly provided on a collective or public basis and were all the better for it.
