When wasn't it?

... When everything’s for sale | TLS. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A more general defect is that the historical dimension is patchy or absent from the book. For the most part, we go back no further than the Reagan era. Yet a longer sweep is liable to produce rather more mixed results. Schools, hospitals and prisons have often in the past been owned and operated for private profit. In England, the “poor schools” financed by the pennies of working-class parents did much to spread mass literacy before the intervention of the state. In the developing world today, it is modest fee-paying schools which lead the way in expanding educational opportunities for the worst-off. As for prisons, the Father of the Marshalsea took it for granted that his better-off visitors should finance his cell upgrade.