>If the public spends less on material they can afford to build additional bridges
Except what happens is that now that we can build them cheaply they waste the same amount of money by turning what could have been simple I beams into a mirror finish exercise in "art" nobody asks for and was bike-shed into oblivion until the whole budget and more was used up. So the public doesn't actually reap any benefit. It just makes work for more parties on the dole. We don't actually get more bridges. We get a bigger racket.
Its not the fault of the engineers, they just did a job. The parasites come from elsewhere. I read that in order to build a reactor in the UK they spent 350 pages in the plan discussing how jobs would be given to various minority groups. Everything government touches is a racket now.
Who even reads all of that? Is it just all in there so someone who says "I really care about <extremely rare ethnic minority>, so I want to make sure they're represented", or is someone actually sitting down and reading 350 pages of job allocations??? I can't imagine a worse punishment, honestly.
Some poor fucking secretary has to read all that shit so that their boss can be advised whether the application is compliant. It won't actually be analyzed unless those sections are sub-par at which point bickering over them becomes a lever the government can pull to extract more flesh. The applicant is forced to go back and say "well we'll hire a minority" or whatever to shore up that section.
On a society level I think everyone realizes the ship is sinking and just looting everything they can before running for the lifeboats.
Bureaucracies became a spoils system. In the 60s the civil rights movement would boycott companies and then demand favors. Minority groups realized the moral weakness of western society and are just in it to loot whatever they can. For them the 350 pages of spoils are very important.
Bridges are not public goods. Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Bridges are both excludable (people can be prevented from crossing unless they pay a toll) and rivalrous (only so many people can use a bridge at once). This makes them a private good. Yes bridges are funded by governments with revenues collected from taxes, but that doesn't change their economic classification.
And the main cost of bridges is not materials, it's design, permitting, and construction. For example: Adjusted for inflation, the new San Francisco Bay Bridge span cost $8.6 billion. Its 450,000 cubic yards of concrete weigh around 1.3 million tons, for a cost of around $6,000 per ton. Concrete is $50-75 per ton, so that's 1% of the cost.
That was a very narrow definition of a public good.
Not preventable? (Excludable)
Not limited in supply? (Rivalous)
What can even be defined as a public good. Can air even be a public good by this definition? Even arguing in good faith I cannot wrap my head around this.
A hospital? Limited capacity even with socialized medicine. Not a public good?
Is this just an (to me) alien and extreme libertarian viewpoint I cannot fathom or am I missing something deeper?
The concrete example stands. But a world in which we do not consider bridges a public good seems rather dystopian to me. I grant you that some of those might be private. But considering all to be private and just with a handwave acknowledge that most are publicly funded seems... Odd...
I am using the Econ 101 definition.[1] Examples of public goods include lighthouses, knowledge, a common language, and national defense.
The reason for the different classification is because public goods obey different economic laws. For example: because public goods are non-excludable, they have the free rider problem.
You're right. If the minimum amount is actually the minimum and not less than necessary, you don't need to exceed that.
What the poster before wanted to imply was that we sacrifice safety or sustainability or some value other than material/money (which may well be true).
Less taxes is not the default. You will most likely get something else.
When extractive profits is involved you will never get a cheaper bridge unless there is fierce competition. Tenders are narrowly defined so you do not see the offers that you can build 2 bridges for the price of one.
In good markets governments keep the bridge building market hot enough so you have the supply ready for the next large projects. That is what keeps the price of big infrastructure projects down.
Hence there is a very good argument for not simply returning the tax dollars.
I do believe in Free markets. But I do believe in good governance as well.
A good example around here is that the knowledge and lessons learned from building the Storebælt Link[0] made the Oresund bridge[1] get in pretty much on budget. Whereas German political fuckery delayed the Fehmarn belt project[2] and will go hugely over budget both due to missing momentum but also due to inflation
