Down from Bureaucracy: The Ambiguity of Privatization and Empowerment

Throughout the world, politicians are dismantling state enterprises and heaping praise on private markets, while in the United States a new rhetoric of "citizen empowerment" links a widespread distrust of government to decentralization and privatization. Here Joel Handler asks whether this restructuring of authority really allows ordinary citizens to take more control of the things that matter in their roles as parents and children, teachers and students, tenants and owners, producers and c...