Public Pays Price For Privatization - Matt Stoller/Politico

[WillyT]

Public pays price for privatization
By: Matt Stoller
June 8, 2011 09:29 PM EDT

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There is a dignity in the Hoover Dam, a massiveness that speaks to a grand national purpose. A country — our country — decided to build it. As the Hoover Dam was constructed, in the middle of the Great Depression, the nearby city of Las Vegas stretched itself from a sleepy town of 5,000 to accommodate tens of thousands of new residents: the people building the dam and staffing the associated businesses.

In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower embarked on the most aggressive public works project in U.S. history — the jobs-producing interstate highway system. And throughout the 1930s and ’40s, the government designed an elaborate set of public financing vehicles to build the great postwar suburban housing stock.

America used to be a country that built things — using public and private resources. Great works of infrastructure provided jobs and returned an incredible social investment. It is inconceivable to imagine the modern economy without the vast investments in infrastructure made by preceding generations — everything from rural electrification to developing the Internet.

So why aren’t we building more of it? One way to think about the question is: Why did we build infrastructure in the first place? The answer is complicated. We need to look to the political coalitions behind our immense public works and ask which coalitions today support the current infrastructure rhetoric. Seen through that lens, the real trend in infrastructure today is not building more of it but privatizing what exists. After all, building infrastructure implies the ability to build things here and being able to use the power of taxation to finance them. Privatizing infrastructure requires the ability to securitize revenue flows. Which one do you think modern America does better?

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Much More: http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=6F0B5482-49B7-4406-9CCE-C591AA84AE4B

:kick:

[saras]

1. Privatization is theft, no more and no less

A park is worth what I will pay to use it, times how many people use it.
But these 'people' include my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, etc., all of whom own a share of this planet and that park. It's most emphatically NOT just the people who live in my county or state right now.

If the park is privatized, that wealth is stolen from all of us, not just the ones living now.

And I've never heard of a privatization paying anything within orders of magnitude of what the privatized resource is worth. Easy way to check - did the public get replacement cost plus a reasonable profit? If not, they got taken.