Thinking Clearly About Public/Private Partnerships

Abstract

In my former life as an assistant district attorney, I interacted regularly with police and detectives. One of them introduced me to a well-worn expression that served as a sort of philosophical view from behind the badge: “Justice is just us.”

As a lawyer, I found the thought disturbing but also deeply revealing. For all of the public sector’s grand symbols and architecture, individual human beings with all of their foibles were the ones who informed and performed the government’s daily pursuit of justice. This basic idea, that the government was actually all too human, held equally across the entire institutional spectrum. The public sector could design and decorate impressive-looking rooms, buildings, uniforms, titles and programs, but beneath all the layers, the government was really the private sector dressed up in a very important costume. The leadership, employees, physical tools and funds that inform the government all find their origin in the private sector. The boundary between public and private in our culture is more porous and uncertain than anyone likes to admit. Like Dorothy, we discover that the seemingly all-powerful public wizard is, indeed, an ordinary man from Omaha, Nebraska, pulling levers behind a flimsy curtain.