Why Not Privatize West Point?

Lunching with a visiting libertarian today, I yielded to the usual professor tricks to test his limits. Would he favor letting me contract myself into slavery? No, slavery was special, but he'd consider an involuntary Chapter 13 bankruptcy, and he liked indentured servitude. How about a 40-year term? Well, now...

And still determined to be annoying, would he like to abolish the Food and Drug Administration? He's thinking about that one. And the Center for Disease Control? I think on that one, he changed the subject.

Well, what about West Point? Privatize the military academies? I'm not sure about him, but as I talked, I realized (perhaps with a bit of a surprise) that I might be willing to consider the idea myself. Consider the following thesis: one of the prime functions of government is to develop a resource until it is economically viable, at which point some private person screams "socialism!" and gets the government to transfer it to private hands where it turns a nifty profit.

It's been true for so many other assets--why not soldiers? What happens now is that (a) at great expense, we train them and (b) provide a bit of battlefield apprenticeship, after which (c) they go to work for Blackwater or Halliburton at 10 times the money. So many private companies, having given up on public education, fully expect to have to bear the costs of training their own staffs. Why should we taxpayers continue to subsidize the production of mercenaries?