Disturbing thoughts I sincerely hope are wrong

Are words like "privatization" and "competitive sourcing" becoming code language for increased entanglement between big government and big business? Leading Objectivist scholar Arthur Silber has a very interesting post on the subject. It is long, but worth reading carefully.

Arthur warns:

Leave aside for the moment your particular opinion about the advisability (or lack thereof) of any of these particular policies, and the very obvious political bias which informs this presentation, and focus instead on the general phenomenon: the blurring of the distinction between the public and private spheres, and the manner in which business and government become indistinguishable from one another.
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[T]he Republicans demonstrate that they have learned nothing from history (except how to direct government power to their own ends), and are not concerned at all with actually freeing the economy from governmental constraints -- because they once more merely ape what the Democrats did before them: [quote]
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[C]apitalism and the free market are made to bear the brunt of criticism which, in fact, ought to be directed at government intervention. In this case, it is privatization that becomes the villain -- and this is precisely the kind of thing that gives privatization a bad name, even though it is not genuine privatization at all: [quote]
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I emphasize again that these manipulations and this alliance between government and certain business interests have nothing at all to do with genuine capitalism. This is the exact counterpart of the "outsourcing" I discussed in Part III: using nominally private business to do the government's work, thus disguising the costs to the taxpayer, and fundamentally distorting the political process. I do not think most people understand this phenomenon, but it is one that now dominates both domestic and foreign policy, fundamentally altering the goals of policies in both arenas. And in fact, outsourcing itself is another weapon deployed by the Republicans in their efforts to create a governmental-business giant, one which is taking over more and more of our economy: [quote]

One of the things I learned in Berkeley is that if you make things complicated enough, and stultifying enough, your enemies will be exhausted, and ordinary citizens will never figure out what you're doing. In this case, I worry that libertarians (especially the live-and-let-live, small "l" variety like yours truly) will never realize what is going on, instead accepting the assurances that government is being made smaller by "privatization." If the reverse is going on -- a major power grab by a new government and big business nexus -- the citizens should at least know about it.

As a free market advocate, I wouldn't want to be forced to become "anti-business!"

Most of all, I hope small businesses aren't being given the shaft.

Additional note: My discussion cannot do justice to Arthur's meticulous analysis. If you got this far, you are hereby ordered to "read the whole thing!"