Public Goods II: Rights and the Public Sphere, or why I love the USPS!

​There is a strong economic argument to be made in favor of public investments. The utility public goods offer is almost invariably cheaper than private goods, they often provide employment, and they may well provide benefit for years to come--last I checked, the Brooklyn Bridge was still connecting the outer boroughs to Manhattan. But it is the rights dimension to public goods that I find most compelling. As I indicated in a previous post, what seems to be missing from current political debate is how public goods extend the compass of rights in democratic society. The individual’s right to the public good is what gives it its defining essence, as compared to a private good. It is also likely why the opponents of public goods do in fact oppose them, despite their economic efficiency. Every establishment of a public good is by definition, an extension of rights. If we want to extend, and not limit, the kinds of rights we have, and expand as well the enjoyment of those rights, public goods must be factored.

​Private goods offer access to utility via individuals’ station in the marketplace: Can you afford that car, those jeans, that collectible? Few would argue that an individual has a right to any such goods, hence we are comfortable that they are, as it were, endowed with increasing degrees of exclusivity, which we call a price tag. You do not have a right to a book (though you do have a right to read, hence libraries and the USPS) but you may access the book if you have cash or card at your local Barnes & Noble.

Public goods, in sharp contrast, are those things to which everyone has a right because of their existence as human beings. We debate what the rights are, often fiercely. But it cannot be denied that once a public good is established in the name of a right, that individuals then have access to that right. The more and better roads we build, the more our right to travel is embodied and safeguarded. If we believe we have rights to clean drinking water, then a municipal system which serves all delivers that right. The more schools we build, the more access to education individuals can enjoy. The source of much current political strife, healthcare, provides a negative example. Were healthcare a public good in America, as it is in every other industrialized nation on earth, we would be able to appreciate healthcare--health itself--as a right to be enjoyed by all rather than an increasingly rare commodity purchased by the relatively well-to-do. To the extent that we include other goods within the purview of public goods, we extend people’s rights: think national parks, for example, which we often think of now as our birthright. I often reflect on the rights to information that we enjoy, embodied in public higher education and the endless streams of data ensuing from expert government agencies.

Public goods can be regulated by a toll. A toll is not a price tag, however, though it may look very much like one. The difference is that if you have the toll, your entrance cannot be denied. A private retailer can (though of course usually does not) restrict purchase even if the price is in hand. A toll is a way to adjudicate the tragedy of the commons, i.e., overuse, that would likely otherwise prevail. And as I previously noted, tolls are generally (at least in theory) designed to be kept as low as possible, while we generally understand prices are maintained as high as possible.

The reason the US Post Office is so important, as Ben Franklin himself knew, is not because it offers a competitive service. It is because its existence helps embody and extend the fulness of rights we enjoy as Americans. The Alaskan citizen living in the bush is defined as an American, in part, because he or she has the same postal rights that a citizen of Manhattan does. He is secure and protected in his right to read what he chooses, to buy such literature and books as he chooses, and to correspond with whom he chooses-—essential aspects of his freedom, as we all agree-—precisely because, and only because, he has a right to the mails. In Franklin’s day, none of these rights had any practical purchase without the mails; only the mails could guarantee the access to the texts through which the right is exercised. FedEx and UPS, valuable services as they are, cannot and do not, by definition, secure the citizen in these rights.

We must also acknowledge that insofar as public goods can extend rights, they can also function to take away rights. This is a frequent accompaniment to public goods in this country, especially when it comes to public infrastructure. The routes and rights-of-way for roads and expressways in America very often-—usually-—conflict with private property rights. An engineer might plan an efficient roadway, but the path the final road takes is often determined by political power: who can and cannot divert the road from their property, who does and does not have the power to protect their property from eminent domain, condemnation, and ultimately usurpation. The generations-long career of Robert Moses was a case study in denying the powerless from the enjoyment of their own property. Countless small business owners, renters, tenement dwellers, and others had their properties condemned and usurped by Moses’s roads. Very often African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other minorities found themselves disenfranchised by the very shape of a roadway or other public installation. The history of the interstate system in this country is, inter alia, the history of poor and Black communities in Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, and elsewhere having their homes dislocated by the roadways middle-class Americans take for granted.

The point stands, however: public goods help to define the world of rights. Public goods comprise the world of the citizen, private goods the world of the customer. There is certainly a place for customers. Undoubtedly the realm of the customer is the realm of freedom. Markets our where our independence and liberties are exercised. But freedom and rights are not the same thing. We often make this mistake, believing that markets are arenas in which our rights are exercised. But that cannot be so, for markets require status with which not everyone is endowed. Our rights, rather, or so we believe, inhere in every individual. We would not want to give up our freedoms, but no less should we want to give up our rights. The free citizen requires a balance of public and private. The world of the private, because it is the world of freedom, is very seductive. We love the idea of choice, though it doesn’t seem likely to me that our current surfeit of choice--of consumer freedom--is producing more happiness. That is a post for another day perhaps. But it must be the case that our rights do not exist in a basket of mutually exclusive choices. Too often the poor must choose between clean water, healthy air, or reasonable education for their children. If we believe these things are rights, then they must not be relegated to the realm of the market. Our rights are our bedrock, from which we cannot be alienated, even by our own choice. Customer complaint desks are not a place in which our rights can ever be secure. For that, we need the democratic accountability that only public goods can provide.

So many of our battles over public goods are really battles over rights. And since not all of our rights have been enumerated, those battles continue to be vital. Done properly—and in this country, that is not ever to be taken for granted--public goods extend our rights.

This is the philosophical argument. There is a very compelling economic argument to be made about public goods as well. American prosperity in the 20th century was the product of many things, not least a robust public sphere that delivered good roads, utilities, libraries, education, research, defense, overseas markets, and more. Public goods from roads to universities, from a credible financial system to our courts system, from the internet to agricultural and industrial subsidies, from basic scientific research to the arts, and more, have underwritten American prosperity for generations. If we relearn this crucial fact, we may enjoy widespread prosperity again. More on the economics of public goods later.

David J. Snyder, PhD

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