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Privatization the transfer of responsibility for public services from the public to the private sector currently evokes intense interest from policy makers. To its advocates, privatization conjures up visions of a lean, streamlined public sector reliant upon the private marketplace for the delivery of public services. To opponents, it conjures up visions of a beleaguered government bureaucracy ceding vital public services to unreliable entrepreneurs. At best, privatization can reduce the costs of government and introduce new possibilities for the better delivery of services. At worst, it may undermine equity, quality, and accountability. In Privatization and Its Alternatives distinguished scholars from several social science disciplines evaluate privatization efforts in the United States and abroad, and at different levels of government: federal, state, and local. They look primarily at three important policy areas education, housing, and law enforcement that sharply illustrate the dilemmas facing policy makers as the debate about privatization shifts from the delivery of hard services, such as refuse collection, to human services. Contributors have very different perspectives: some are enthusiastic about privatization, others are very skeptical indeed. None of these papers has been published elsewhere; the volume developed from a 1987 conference on privatization sponsored by the La Follette Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin Madison. A particular strength of this collection lies in its consideration of alternative forms of service delivery. The privatization of public housing, for instance, may involve subsidies to the poor (vouchers), tenant management (a hybrid form of privatization), or outright sale. How, and how well, have such policies worked? Examples from other countries may prove especially enlightening: the English sale of public housing to tenants is one of the largest asset sales in the entire privatization movement; Australia has experimented with public subsidies to private schools; and Japan has experimented with the privatization of law enforcement and corrections. These issues are the subject of lively public debate in the United States today and are discussed at length in this volume. Thus Privatization and Its Alternatives speaks not only to scholars of public policy but also to a wide range of practitioner who must decide whether or how to privatize."

Using materials from Witness archives, the U.S. State Department, Nazi files, and other sources, M. James Penton demonstrates that while many ordinary German Witnesses were brave in their opposition to Nazism, their leaders were quite prepared to support the Hitler government. --from publisher description

The Johovah's Witnesses, members of a religious sect founded in 1872, see themselves as citizens of Jehovah's Kingdom, and thus decline to swear allegiance to any worldly governments.

Between Resistance and Martyrdom is the first comprehensive historical study of the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses during the Holocaust era. Refusing to perform military service under Germany's Third Reich due to their fundamental belief in nonviolence, Jehovah's Witnesses caught the attention of the highest authorities in the justice system, the police, and the SS. Although persecuted and banned from practicing their beliefs by the Nazi regime in 1933, the Jehovah's Witnesses' unified resistance has been largely forgotten. Basing his work on a wide range of sources, including documents and archives previously unconsidered as well as critical analyses of Jehovah's Witness literature and survivor interviews, Detlef Garbe chronicles the Nazis' relentless persecution of this religious group before and during World War II. The English-language edition of this important work features a series of original photographs not published in the German edition. These striking images bring a sense of individual humanity to this story and help readers comprehend the reality of the events documented. Between Resistance and Martyrdom is an indispensable work that will introduce an English-speaking audience to this important but lesser-known part of Holocaust history.