Build & Maintain Necessities
Why the means of production must be separated from the means of necessity
It’s not a revelation to say “infrastructure” has become a silly word. What does it mean? Roads? Sewers? Airports? Chip factories? Anything and anything. At the same time, what does the “free” (private) market do better than the government? Chip factories, to be sure, though these companies will take a federal grant when it’s offered. The distinction needed in policy and economics is between the means of production and the means of necessity. Bad faith readers of Friedrich Hayek will claim that anything produced must be produced by privately owned firms and their efficacious operators. But this is pre-bunked by the military, courts, and lawmaking. Does the production of security and justice live in a special category, separate from the other elements of the economy? Yes, it turns out. These are needs that must be maintained vigorously and without which society would become unstable and ill. Wild price swings or failures are unacceptable in these basic-need-producing economic categories. Each is a means of necessity and necessarily owned and operated by government.
There are other currently private components of the American landscape that must be considered necessities and therefore run by the government. It’s not ideal that many of these necessities should have to be appropriated by our governments in order to be publicly managed, but when you start with a private system, such is the inevitable zero sum consequence—though the government may be able to start-up some of its own systems that co-exist with the private ones. Means of necessity categories include healthcare, intracity & intercity movement of persons, residential housing, electricity generation & distribution, water, basic food, and air. Each category contains a need-floor, below which it must generally be agreed no one should fall below in our day; having no house, no way to get around, no electricity, no medical care, no air, no water, no food—whatever a person’s politics, it’s hard to argue in favor of producing these lacks, and today the market so produces.
In some cases, as in housing, the government will need to buy a given means of necessity out of private hands. In others, the government may have cause to appropriate at less-than-market-prices what is currently often privately owned—electricity is likely one of these cases, as a government sanctioned monopoly defies all reasonable market principles and produces unjustifiable uncompetitive profits. In some spheres, the government may start its own programs and services. Healthcare may be one of these fields, where a root-and-branch blank slate approach could be initiated, and eventually overrun the current state.
The key notion is that while some means of production and their outcomes are optional, others are critical to the sustenance and acceptable day-to-day life of every human today. Above necessity, the government need not control excess products and services. But the needs floor cannot be allowed to bend or break under market pricing, ignorance, or other private whims in a moral society.