Well, I don’t know what else government supported infrastructure projects should be called other than subsidies to individuals and organizations that are able to use the infrastructure, unless user fees are changed that cover all costs of the project and operation. Perhaps another word might be suggested. However, what ever word is used should capture the sense that infrastructure is an input factor to economic production and those costs are usually externalized rather than accounted as part of the production costs .
There are reasons for subsidies, and I never condemned subsidies universally. I also never supported pure market theory interpretations. Pure market theory doesn’t seem to work without central government intervention. Saying that however, does not suggest that government intervention conforms to policies that might be derived from, say, Mechanism Design Theory. What I did ask is that farmers not be singled out and trashed for receiving subsidies. Almost all economic activity can be interpreted as subsidized in many ways. Subsidies are the nature of our pluralist style of governance.
Regarding cities, it’s not too difficult to find studies that describe cities as ‘the economic engines of economic growth.’ Many studies suggest that our prosperity and even survival in the globalized world economy requires that our urban based companies must be able to compete internationally. The required solution inevitably is more money (subsidies) for the cities. However, some studies that advocate more money for cities also observe that beyond a certain size, urban efficiencies of scale become inefficiencies.
So, if efficiencies of scale become inefficiencies, how is general public funding of infrastructure for large cities anything but a subsidy to individuals and companies that use the infrastructure? Action that decreases efficiency is unlikely to contribute to the general benefit of everybody. However, a who benefits, who pays study might be conducted. I expect that such a study wouldn’t find that the vast majority of Canadians who’ve been haven’t shared in the current economic boom for the most part would for the most part pay but not benefit.
My issue is the sustainability of our present globalized economy rather than subsidies. We may be wrecking the environment with our version of globalized capitalism. The supposed economic growth engine, the city, may have a side-effect of fostering the increasing concentration of wealth in recent decades. In history, societies do not survive highly inequitable divisions of wealth. Ultimately the conditions that produce few rich wreck society. Ultimately a wrecked environment and wrecked society wrecks economies and prosperity as well. Eventually as Mao wrote, ‘All politics comes out of the barrel if a gun.’ Ernesto Guevara wrote ‘How could a culture that built such things [Machu Picchu] come to this…so much poverty and injustice…how can you have a revolution without guns?’ I’m not interested in living in a world where such sentiments seem realistic, and I’m also not interested in a world that compromises human rights as medicine for supposed terrorists that hid under every bed, which of course , contributes heavily to the prosperity of a few at the expense of everybody.
I’m not interested in living in those worlds, yet they are what the near future may hold. We don’t seem to be doing very well a putting together the pieces. We have a strong economy that most Canadians have not shared the benefits of. Public policies spend money and have little effect on levels of poverty. We rape the earth and produce an ‘oil dollar’ that few share, and our over priced currency potentially shuts down industry in the rest of the country. Our political system seems to be driven more by the advocacy positions of special interest groups rather than any coherent social or economic management principles. We seem so tied to our conventional thinking that we don’t seem to be able to question if cities may be an archaic form of organization rather than engines of economic growth. Perhaps we can’t conceive of the questions because we can’t conceive that infrastructure is subsidized.
From my perspective, subsidies seem to be more a symptom than the disease itself. I don’t really care much about subsidies to farmers, even if they are corporate farmers. I do care about the fabric on my life, which is cut from the same cloth as is everybody’s. We all sink or swim together.