I’ve written before that Public-Private Partnerships (P3s) for financing infrastructure projects are a way for sociopathic Baby Boomers to dump an impossible-to-pay liability on Millennials, and are a fire sale of our roads and bridges to multinational foreign mega-corporations that are laughing all the way to the banks they already own.

There is no other group that loves to bang the P3 drum as the silver bullet to our infrastructure needs than LIBERTARIANS. They can be so good on civil liberties, foreign policy, criminal justice reform, and cannabis legalization, but they are so god-damned wrong when it comes to infrastructure policy.

You can tell Libertarians have no independent, critical thinking functions because they apply the same arguments to every issue, including infrastructure policy:

1. Never Raise Taxes

Libertarians believe in the smallest government possible, so their strategy is to oppose any increase in taxes. I mentioned Grover Norquist in a prior post, and his anti-tax pledge has led to paralyzed revenues for essential government services, including maintaining our roads and bridges. This Libertarian anti-tax ideology has been so successful that it took New Jersey 26 years to raise their gasoline tax, meaning that up until 2016, we were paying for the maintenance of our roads and bridges with 1989 dollars.

This is all part of a “Starve the Beast” strategy in which government no longer has enough revenue and therefore the only solution is to…

2. Privatize Everything

Government clearly doesn’t know what they’re doing if they ran out of money, so let the free market handle it! To make it more palatable to the public, let’s hide this behind this new “Public-Private Partnership” buzzword.

However, Robert Poole of Reason doesn’t hide the fact that P3 is just a means toward privatizing our infrastructure. He literally says:

“highways as businesses”

If that doesn’t scare you, it should.

Poole also unreasonably argues that the setup of P3s have an advantage because they:

“create a direct customer/provider relationship between the roadway user and the concessionaire.”

There are two things wrong with Poole’s statement:

(A) Government does have Customer/Supplier Relationships

Poole and other Libertarians apply a traditional customer/supplier mentality to government services, because their ideology is based in the agricultural/manufacturing world. There is a false assumption that in government, customer/supplier relationships do not exist, and therefore there are no incentives to deliver construction project on-time and on-schedule.

Whether projects are delivered by Design-Bid-Build (DBB) or Design-Build (DB), there absolutely are incentives in-place for all parties involved, whether the Design Engineer of Record, the Contractor, the Owner’s Field Representative, and the Owner. Hand-offs exist between Owner and each contracted party if you understand the project delivery life-cycle (regardless of delivery method).

As a high-level example under DBB,

1. Design Engineer (customer) reviews public RFP by Owner (supplier).
2. Owner (customer) contracts with Design Engineer (supplier) to produce bid documents.
3. Contractor (customer) reviews public bid documents by Design Engineer/Owner (suppliers).
4. Owner / Roadway User (customers) obtain finished road/bridge by Contractor (supplier).

The truth is that these relationships occur at an even more granular level due to the nature of the design/review and construction/review process. The challenge, as with any business, is making sure these hand-offs between customer and supplier are adding value to the final product.

(B) The Roadway User is never a “Direct” Customer of Infrastructure

Poole says that under P3, the user has a direct relationship with the concessionaire who is financing the project. If a roadway user drives through a toll, do you really think he or she sees how that payment is DIRECTLY maintaining the roads and bridges?

Remember, even with so-called HIGHLY REGULATED public infrastructure projects, there is a ton of spin on whether it was “on-time” or “on-budget”:

As I conclude in that post, the problem is a lack of government transparency and accurate, easy-to-understand reporting of projects.

I guarantee that the public will have a MUCH harder time getting accurate and transparent reporting on costs and schedules if roads are privatized, because the oft-expressed advantage of privatization is not having to deal with so-called burdensome government regulations. This leads to Libertarians third repeated argument…

3. Fuck Social Responsibility

Or in their words, let the INVISIBLE HAND of the free market decide what is best, regulations be damned!

Their corrupt overuse of the Invisible Hand concept further reinforces points (A) and (B) above: they want no transparency to the public (Invisible) and they don’t acknowledge hand-offs and would rather remain hands-off (Hand, obviously).

Infrastructure — moreso than other publicly-owned and maintained assets — absolutely requires regulations for the sake of social responsibility.

Transportation is a civil rights issue, but I doubt you will find a Libertarian ever acknowledging this:

Most recently, comments by Elon Musk have highlighted this ignorance:

These three points on Libertarians can be found on full display in this Intelligence Squared debate between two infrastructure professionals and two Libertarian unprofessionals, Adrian Moore of Reason (i.e. unreasonable) and Stephen Moore of Heritage (i.e. privileged white male heritage):

See Part 1 and Part 2.