Cost analysis of keeping the roads from freezing.

As I sit in bed and stare into the blank screen of the computer, the sound of a passing snow truck takes hold of my consciousness. I can tell from the sound that it is spreading salt (or salt alternative) to keep the roads from freezing over after the slushy mess left by today's passing storm. I briefly thought about how the City government decides when and how much salt to use. No doubt if the city were a private corporation, someone in a cube with a calculator and a degree in math or computational finance would determine whether the cost of police response to accidents as a result of the iced over streets would be more expensive than keeping the roads from actually icing over. I'm no math major but I can't see how, at 9:47pm on a Tuesday night, it would be cheaper to salt/sand the roads than to let them ice over and allow a few accidents to happen. The argument could be made that the roads will need to be salted and sanded by morning anyway. But that just reinforces my argument: if we'll need to do it by morning anyway, why take the intermediate step of keeping them from icing the night before.

I'll tell you why. Because the City ISN'T a private corporation. The reason we haven't privatized our local governments (not yet anyway) is because we can hold government to a higher standard than we could any private, for-profit corporation. This is exactly the argument I make when people argue that the government hasn't and can never do anything right. The assumption being that if we privatized more things and made a financial profit the motivating factor, more things would get done. I simply don't see how this is the case.

In the example of keeping roads from icing over, there is a greater value put on human life and property by government than by corporations. The accidents that people get into are merely a cost of doing business to a corporation. To the government however, these are real constituents who have real needs for their cars to remain out of the shop for weeks at a time just to save some one else a buck. If you make everything a matter of making money, there's little reason to see humanity for what it is: human.