Minor Thoughts from me to you

I think almost everyone agrees that all levels of government underinvest in infrastructure and maintenance. Here's an argument for turning infrastructure over to a competitive private sector.

No, what makes Disney invest in infrastructure is not happy thoughts. Johnston is in fact clear about this:

The Walt Disney Co. invests in infrastructure because it makes the company money.

The problem with America is that our public infrastructure has been turned over to a fickle political process that is not governed by a rational calculation of cost and benefit, market test and experimentation but by a pursuit of power, glory and advantage that only rarely coincides with the public interest.

America should be more like Disneyland and to do that we need to develop institutions that allow more infrastructure to built by the private sector. Most ambitiously we need more cities as hotels, more proprietary cities.

∞

From Alex Tabarrok, at Marginal Revolution:

Australia farmers pay for water at market prices. Water rights are traded and government water suppliers have either been privatized or put on a more stand-alone basis so that subsidies are minimized or at least made transparent.

Australia has one of the largest private school sectors in the developed world with some 40% of students in privately-run schools.

Australia has a balanced-budget principle (balanced over the business cycle) which has been effective although perhaps more important has been a widely held aversion to deficits combined with an understanding of sustainability and intergenerational fairness (factors which also played a role in the decision to create private, pre-funded pensions).

If things go badly in the USA, I may have to head for Australia. (The scenery's nice too.)

∞

The National Center for Policy Analysis published a press release from the HealthPlanWire today, showing the grow in private insurance world wide.

HPW follows health insurance markets globally, and is projecting that total covered lives will exceed one billion by 2012. Single-payer systems are declining world-wide because they are primarily based in countries which have static or declining populations, while private insurance is growing rapidly in countries with the fastest population growth.

Most of this is coming from developing countries which are for the first time ever building out a health financing system, choosing to encourage private health insurance over single-payer on five continents. Examples include China, Columbia, South Africa, Mexico, India, Australia and most of eastern Europe. Most of these countries considered and rejected a single-payer system in favor of a private insurance system, and more than a dozen more are following suit in the same regions.

Private insurance is the chosen system for several reasons. In developing countries in eastern Europe there is a strong aversion to the former Soviet-style model, and western European global insurers like Allianz and Vienna Insurance Group have actually acquired the entire single payer system from the government and turned it private.

Cool.