How does the buying and selling of influence hollow out government? Some make the argument that, whatever its moral shortcomings, the profit motive, including its corrupt dimension, is in fact an efficient economic mechanism: it gets things done. As one character argues in the movie Syriana, corruption is why we win. But as MacMullen points out, for a government to be effective on a national or an imperial scale, there needs to be a presumption that information is traveling accurately up and down the administrative chain of command, and that every link in the chain between a command and its execution is reliable and strong. Putting power into private hands frequently ends up breaking that link. Making the exercise of power contingent on payment by definition breaks the link.

Privatization today often makes itself felt in ways that would have turned no heads in ancient Rome. Naturally, it still includes influence peddling and bribery and the buying and selling of public office. Former California 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, resigned his congressional seat, having been reportedly warned by his majority leader that if he stayed and lost his seat for his party, he “could not expect a lucrative career on K Street”—that is, he would jeopardize any future as an influence peddler, what the Romans called a suffragator. (All for naught in Ney’s case: he’s now in jail.) And as in Rome, privatization still includes turning over government departments to incompetent cronies, empowering private individuals at the expense of public intentions. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, staffed by inexperienced political appointees and 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; re-distributing treasure from one sector of society to another; forecasting the weather and mapping the human genome—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. The ostensible motives may be pure, but the result is to diminish government’s capacity. For one thing, government loses the ability to perform certain functions; it’s hard to un-privatize. Moreover, 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 governmental 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, written by Daniel Guttman and Barry Willner; its subtitle spoke ominously of “the government’s multi-billion-dollar giveaway” of decision-making authority. 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 more 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 “re-inventing government” movement taken up by the Clinton administration: “We would do well,” one proponent wrote, “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.