“Infrastructure” is among the most popular goods for which folks think the federal government ought to have a heavy hand in producing. Let’s think a little bit more about this. A few observations that came to mind while driving to work on a totally un-congested highway that runs right through downtown Rochester and connects the Eastern and Western suburbs to the city.
Both the equity considerations and the revenue limitations of the gas tax point very sharply toward thinking of new ways to fund and maintain highway infrastructure (perhaps even urban roads, but again that’s another discussion). A far superior way to charge for these services is to charge users a per-mile fee that is tied not only to how many miles they drive, but to the real costs they impose on us for driving. Hence heavy vehicles would be charged more than lighter ones, and vehicles that contribute more to congestion are charged more than those that contribute less. This is no longer a technological obstacle but rather a political and psychological one. It is also a consideration that ties into the underlying message of the beginning of this post. It is not at all clear that “infrastructure” is even a public good at all. In the case of intercity transit and perhaps even for much of the transit that happens within cities, it is overwhelmingly the case that excluding the majority of non-payers from enjoying the benefits is possible. And in cases where it is not easily possible, it is increasingly easy to bundle the difficult to exclude goods (such as city sidewalks) with other goods for which it is very hard to exclude non-payers (i.e. homes).
TAKEAWAY
The record of private provision and maintenance of roads and other elements of the infrastructure vector is especially good when compared to how well the governments have provided these services. Advocates of good government and social justice should take notice. Rather than wringing your hands about how many billions less future federal budgets are “shortchanging our crumbling infrastructure” you ought to be celebrating the decreased “publicness” of many elements of the modern infrastructure vector. The point of “public goods” is that these are things that unfortunately we have to rely on coercive collection action in order to get what we otherwise would be able to provide for ourselves. It’s just contracting costs prevent ourselves from being able to do it. Now, if it is not only possible but also likely cheaper and safer and better to have voluntary actions provide services we should all be celebrating it. This means that the pie is bigger.
But we should all be celebrating it for a second and more important reason (at least if you claim to be a “progressive” who is progressive because of a belief in good government, a position I used to take myself). What reason is that? Because now when private voluntary action can take care of interstate highways and bridges and perhaps a few other things, that frees up the government to focus on more valuable things, to focus on things it does well. But the insistence in the modern progressive movement that the government provide “infrastructure” demonstrates nothing more than a religious commitment to the idea that if something used to be done by government it must always be done, or that some things that just “sound” like public goods must be provided by governments. But the many billions of dollars each year that could be saved by allowing voluntary action to take care of some infrastructure can both be refunded back to us and used in perhaps better areas, such as funding basic R&D. Not only does ignorance of this demonstrate an utter lack of imagination, it flies in the face of the many proclamations that I hear about just wanting a better society, a good government, and so on. That’s not at all what radical insistence on government roads demonstrates – it demonstrates to me a dangerously dogmatic approach to wanting the government to do anything at all that suits your interest. If folks truly did respect voluntary forces, private property and free exchange you’d expect a little more reflection on this point. But they don’t. Just putting a caveat that markets can work great in your otherwise paean to the virtue of government roads and bridges means no more to me than reading those dairy trucks in my area telling me my milk comes from “Local Farmers Who Care” who absolutely know nothing about me. We are what we do, not what we say.
>> “Now, there is an element of public-goodness in everything that is produced and consumed. When I hear a nice song on the radio on the way to work, I am in a better mood and perhaps am a better teacher that day. Since I cannot capture the gains my students enjoy because of the song, then I probably “underinvest” in listening to good music on the way to school.”
When I argue with people that education should return to the private sector, this argument comes up first, every time.
“Now, there is an element of public-goodness in everything that is produced and consumed.”
This is being argued in court, that people are impossing a cost on others for doing (or not doing) X. I come up with this very often, too. No matter how much people benefit from others choices (without which our natural condition is one of despair, intensive labor, and probable starvation), it seems that we have a natural ability to see only the negative that affects us. I guess this is Basiat’s “seen and unseen.”
As for seen and unseen…. if the government had not built all these roads suited to one kind of vehicle, we might have all-terrain vehicles and even aircars and we might have had the Internet (telephone and radio with typewriter: teletype and telephoto) in 1930… who knows?