One reader complains that he could never see why we use the word ‘service’ for public monopolies such as health, education, the post office (and even the ‘civil service’) when they deliver such rotten products.
Then a local farmer mentioned he was getting a bull in to service his cows. After that, our reader recognised that it was actually a pretty good way to describe the relationship between public producers and the taxpayers who have to fund them.
– Eamonn Butler, Adam Smith Institute
You don’t need to go as far as the bullfucking metaphor to explain the problem with public services.
There are several senses of the word.
The first is where ‘service’ is from ‘servant’ or even ‘servus/slave’. Working-class people who can remember grandparents or parents living and working “in service” a century to seventy years ago usually see the word as meaning a horrible imposition on the worker – far worse, more humiliating and exhausting than any noisy, dirty factory production line. Factories to which, however filthy and dangerous, the chambermaids, kitchen scullies, and gardenboys of Britain fled the very first moment they could.
Then there is the new post-1970s marketing class, for which “service economy” has a magical ring, as if implying something automatically more sophisticated and exciting than manufacturing: though there is of course a world of difference between being in the service sector as a computing consultant and being in the service sector as a fast-food restaurant cashier or floor-mopper.
Then there is a rathe dumb municipal sense of “service” where it means little more than “something that happens regularly that I can’t think of a better name for right now” covering anything from repairing telegraph poles, to checking if the mains water supply is still clean and drinkable.
I suspect most public-sector employees use the word as a combination of the emotionally-loaded first sense and the bureaucratically neutral, even empty, third sense. The second sense may not even have occurred to them – and we should acknowledge that it is just as politically-slanted as the first sense.
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