The social compact here is simple: We give the money to government, and all we ask in return is that these publicly shared responsibilities and resources are properly maintained.Thomas Sowell:Maintenance is necessary but boring, and since government is made up of human beings who abhor boredom, few elected officials or high-level managers are all that interested in this mundane task. Instead, they want to do big, exciting, bold new things - things they can claim for their own.
And in the past half-century, American government has redefined its core responsibilities. No longer does government exist for the purposes of maintenance and upkeep. Instead, it is seen as a means - perhaps the only significant means - of healing social flaws and reweaving the social fabric.
In the process, as the social scientist Nathan Glazer once said, we have become more interested in having government do the sorts of things nobody knows how to do (cure poverty) and less interested in ensuring that government master the sorts of technical tasks it used to do pretty well.
Under these conditions, government workers and elected officials aren't given much credit for just keeping things going - for doing the invisible but necessary work of ensuring that bridges don't just fall down.
A pattern that has persisted for more than two centuries is likely to continue unless something fundamental is changed.
What really needs to be done is to change the incentives.
While most bridges in the United States are owned and operated by government agencies, there are times and places where bridges have been owned and operated by private companies, just as numerous other goods and services are provided through the marketplace.
How would that change the incentives?
A company that has to get the money to build and maintain bridges or other infrastructure through the voluntary actions of people in the financial markets, instead of being able to extract money from the taxpayers, is going to find financiers a lot more finicky about what is being done with their money.
People who are putting their own money on the line are going to want to have their own experts taking a look under the bridges they finance, to see where there are rust, cracks, or crumbling supports.
When people know that the lawsuits that are sure to follow after a bridge collapses are going to drain millions of dollars of their own money — not the taxpayers’ money — that keeps the mind focused.
Those who like to think of the government as the public interest personified may be horrified at the idea of turning a governmental function over to private enterprise.
Politicians who want to hang onto sources of patronage and power will of course encourage people to look at things that way. But the track record of privately run infrastructure will compare favorably with government-run infrastructure.
But that is only if we stop to compare — and to think.
