Infrastructure And The Public Good

Our corporate democracy has done a number on the value of the concept of public. Today, through propaganda and marketing, all that has value is the concept of private. Study after study prove that public sector employees deliver more for less and show how corporations fleece taxpayers in the long term.

We seem to have the same debate about our infrastructure and the public good. Congress, especially with Republicans in charge, do not have the political will to invest in either. Our roads, bridges and parks are deteriorating, yet we invest very little. I've thought for years we should put the military in charge of all of this and there would be no funding problems. The Pentagon seems to get the cash it needs, and most times more.

Why don't we have free internet for the public good? Free college? Mostly because there's a buck to be made.

It got me thinking about rural America in the 1930s. Very few rural communities were electrified back then. Imagine living without electricity, running water, indoor plumbing or a central heating system. Yet, that's how half the country lived at the time. And it cost lives, or at least years of life. In Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, he writes about the life of a woman in the Texas hill country. According to Caro, women walked hundreds of yards to gather water, further to gather wood for the stove, and it was worse on wash day. At night, they worked by dim kerosene lamps.

No private company would electrify the hill country in Texas, or any other rural community in the US. There weren't enough consumers in each area to pay the construction costs, let alone the delivery distribution. Johnson changed all that. He wrangled money from the Rural Electrification Administration (a great New Deal program) and brought electricity to western Texas.

It's hard to overstate how this changed lives in Texas. Refrigerated food and electric lights were game changers, mostly for women. Electricity brought with it other conveniences and eased the burden for rural families.

Almost overnight, the life expectancy for women in the Texas hill country grew significantly. In Caro's book, he tells us the most popular birth name for boys in Texas in 1940 was Lyndon.

We could do this today, if we had the political will.