Bill Wooldridge is a Harvard graduate with a Juris Doctorate from the Univ of Virginia. He penned his critique of government services while in the employ of a government entity, namely the U.S. Army, but the impetus came from his experiences of British socialism after he won a Richard Weaver fellowship for a year's study of medieval history at St. Andrews University in Scotland. British government services were so slow, especially in telephone services, that he simply had to do without. "Nevertheless, the experience rankled", he wrote (p 7). In the spirit of his first horrific encounter with socialized telephone service in Scotland, he exams several U.S. socialized services and asks would they do better if they were privatized?
The book's eight chapters after the Preface are 1) The Post Office; 2) The Independent Postal System of America; 3) Every Man His Own Mintmaster; 4) An Education of Choice; 5) Voluntary Justice; 6) Protection Money; 7) Paying for Roads; and 8) The Public Interest; followed by a Bibliography.
He looks at the Postal Service, which the government had recently transformed into a corporation - but a monopoly still. Far more beneficial, Wooldridge shows, would be the repeal of the government's ban on private mail carriers. Wooldridge doesn't grasp the fact that the majority of the U.S. mails at the time he was writing were moved between post offices by private carriers - i.e. postal contrators. Nor is he aware that UPS and Federal Express also use the Postal Service to expedite certain overnight deliveries that would be cost-prohibitive otherwise. Lastly, he does not address the military or national security issues that necessitate the state's monopoly. Nonetheless, he does a nice job of advocating the privatization of postal services.
Wooldridge advocates the privatization of government services such as private money, voluntary justice, private schooling, private police and fire companies, and private roads. In all these areas, Wooldridge champions the benefits of private enterprise. He finds that all public monopolies justify themselves on the basis of the public interest. But there is no "public interest" he says, only a constantly changing multitude of particularized "publics" (customers) with particular consumer needs. Free enterpise can serve them better, he claims.
The only caveats are his skipping over the privatization of the military and not addressing the corporation as a creature of the State.
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