Public Goods: An Introduction

Recent reports that the incoming Trump administration is considering privatizing the US Postal Service (USPS)--a recurring aim for conservatives, it must be noted--prompts a reflection on what we call "public goods" in America. In my view public goods are essential to our national prosperity, to our quality of living, and to our basic rights, as I shall attempt to explain. Public goods also connect in important ways to the history of US empire. Yet our capacity to think about, consider, even discuss public goods has been severely attenuated in recent decades. 

The Roberto Clemente bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Map of Erie Canal courtesy of https://www.eriecanal.org/maps.html

By public goods we mean a whole range of provisions generally provided (in liberal society) by governments, at taxpayer expense, and available of access by all. Public infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and tunnels are certainly one example. National defense, police protection, access to courts, and a monetary system constitute another category of public goods. Modern America provides other forms, such as parks (national, state, municipal), broadcast entertainment and news (e.g., PBS), or, in some communities, public pools and public beaches. Governments can and do provide access to knowledge, through public libraries, or via social, economic, and commercial statistics released by various government agencies. The air traffic control system, run by the Federal Aviation Administration, provides another kind of example. The list is varied and seemingly endless.
 
Both the American political right and left have largely removed public goods from the national conversation. The right, for largely ideological reasons, has argued heatedly since the New Deal of the 1930s (which provided so much of our contemporary public goods infrastructure) that public goods are “socialistic” and in every case inferior morally and economically to private goods. They are wasteful, deprive entrepreneurs of profit-making opportunities, and breed dependency. This has not always been the argument of American conservatism, as Alexander Hamilton’s establishment of a national banking system or the Whig Party’s championing of transportation infrastructure, such as the Erie Canal, in the 1830s-50s attests. The left, which throughout much of the 20th century has been the stalwart champion of public goods, has increasingly for the last generation or two abandoned the defense of public goods in favor of a focus on identity politics. While Democratic presidents routinely propose public goods programs (such as the Biden administration's "Build Back Better proposals, later renamed the "Inflation Reduction Act," the renaming an obvious admission of the left's inability to mount a potent articulation of public goods investments), there has been no substantial program of national investments, as such, since LBJ's Great Society. 
               
There are at least two essential arguments in favor of public goods which we’ll outline here and develop in later postings. The first is that they are almost infallibly cheaper than private goods. Public goods achieve the economies of scale that guarantee lower costs, usually of production and almost certainly of use. One publicly-financed road system is much cheaper to build and operate than a chain of private roads. A community (i.e., public) pool is much, much cheaper to build and operate than a warren of smaller, private, backyard pools. Imagine the costs, to say nothing of the complexity, if each airline operated its own air traffic control system. Economies of scale plus the absence of the profit factor (public goods are, by definition, non-profit) inarguably make public goods cheaper. A public national health care system, of the sort run by the West European nations, would be inarguably much, much less expensive to operate than the patchwork of private insurers under which the US now labors. 
               
The second, and I think more important, argument in favor of public goods is that, as the economists say, they are "non-exclusive." That is, individuals cannot be kept from their use by their relative strength in the market. Put another, and I think better way, public goods are those goods to which citizens have access by right. It is an American’s right to use a public park, or the interstate highway, or a community pool. The provision of a public good, by definition, represents the extension of rights. By contrast, few of us would argue that a citizen has a right to an automobile or a pair of jeans; the price is the mechanism by which an individual registers the strength of his or her desire for a private good to which he or she does not otherwise have a right. A toll may be imposed on a public good for some reason, and in contemporary society those tolls do in fact operate as a price mechanism: If you don’t pay the entrance fee, you can’t enter Yellowstone Park. Still, the distinction between price and toll is an important one, especially as it concerns rights. If you have the toll-–which after all is generally kept as low as possible-–you cannot be denied use of a public good. In contrast, even if you have the price–-which by definition is kept as high as possible-—you could still be thrown out of the Apple store. This principle was one of the underlying premises of Jim Crow racist exclusion, for example.

There are two legitimate counter-arguments to public goods. The first is that they breed corruption. Sweetheart deals between public authorizing agencies and private contractors have defined the history of public goods in America, going all the way back to the Whig years, and before. A robust system of public accounting is always necessary to ensure that the taxpayers get bang for their buck, and advocates of public goods should not gloss this issue. The second, perhaps even more troubling problem with public goods, is that, just as with private goods, they are amenable to racist exclusionary practice. Scores of historians have documented the ways in which politically disempowered groups, notably African Americans, have had communities, neighborhoods, and homesteads razed and displaced for the benefit of roads, bridges, and parks. The interstate highway system of the 1950s displaced Black communities in Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and many other places in the 1950s and 60s. Robert Caro's great biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, undoubtedly the greatest purveyor of public goods in the 20th century, details countless such examples in greater New York City alone.   
               
So public goods do not produce consensus in American life. Americans have always fought over public goods. Fierce battles over infrastructure, from the Whiggish heyday to the New Deal, have defined eras in American politics, and those epic struggles have given way to even more transcendent ideological struggles in our day over public versus private goods. And throughout our history, local but no less fierce debates have occurred about what sort of public goods might be built and where they should be located. 
               
Nevertheless there is reason to believe that public goods might get us beyond what is by now a very stale political polarization in American politics. A return to a public goods discourse would certainly re-energize and refocus the left. It also has the potential to provide political valences, and thus consensus, with a reformed right. Conservatives may decry public goods in general, but local communities still want bridges, hospitals, and parks. A more robust argument will have to be made, but schools and post offices are generally much wanted as well. More pertinently, Americans are always covetous of their rights. And a more effective conversation around public goods as they extend our rights, and hence our freedoms, may yet avail. The discussion about rights is a historic sweet spot in American politics, an idea around which many of us, regardless of where we fall on the political spectrum, might rally. It’s worth talking about.

Here's another brief discussion of the value of public goods: ‘Public goods’ made America great and can do so again.
 
Expect to see much more about #publicgoods on the FractalPast blog as we develop the conversation. Share your thoughts below! 

Suggested reading:
Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Penguin, 1975): 
​The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro: 9780394720241 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
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