Brian Leubitz at Calitics has a great post about the ongoing privatization of California’s infrastructure. As Brian points out, the current fad for public private partnerships is the end result of years of conservative attacks against the very idea of taxes. If we can;t raise money to pay for things, the only way to finance them is to sell off things previous generations built.

Do you think that Pat Brown realized that there is no such thing as a free lunch? That corporations are not benevolent Gumdrop Fairies who rain down gifts upon the populace? No, the first Gov. Brown knew all too well that it is up to the state to provide for a long-term infrastructure that will keep the middle class thriving. Anybody who has driven the toll-clogged freeways of Orange County will tell you that all those tolls, and all that commuting aren’t cheap. So people move to where there is infrastructure that is provided (sans tolls). We sprawl, we make decisions which are short-sighted, just like these three governors.

And what, pray tell, is the motivating factor in why we MUST sell our soul to Halliburton or some other similarly situated company? Well, it’s because we don’t like taxes, of course:

The fact is, we can’t expect public tax funds to do the job; the public feels overtaxed and California’s state treasurer is warning that our fiscal imbalance could continue for the next 20 years. The word out of the federal government is much the same: too many needs, not enough money. (SF Chron 10/28/07)

No explanation: it’s just fact. The conservative movement has preached, through the mouths of Norquist & Co., that taxes are evil, that taxes are too freaking high. That taxes will destroy our economy or other such nonsense. So, where did this tax-hating structure come from? Well, partially from the conservative movement which gave life to three of these authors.

So, I guess it’s okay to distribute propaganda, and then cite it as fact when it comes back at you? Well, terrific, at least we know how the game is played now.

This has, of course, been the plan of the corporate right all along. Make it harder and harder for government to collect taxes, which makes it necessary to sell off parts of the government’s function to private business, which makes it harder to collect revenue, which makes the role of the government smaller and smaller, until eventually government’s role is so circumscribed that, as Grover Norquist famously said, “government gets so small you can drown it in a bathtub.”

Which is all well and good if you run a company like Haliburton or Lockheed-Martin, but less so if you depend on things like roads and public transit to get you to work. Or on clean air or clean water. Or on a thousand other things we take for granted.

Meanwhile, here in San Francisco, “public private partnership” is the way Gavin Newsom explains how we’re going to somehow end up with a free wireless network without spending any money (Although now that his reelection is pretty much assured, we’ve not heard much about citywide wireless lately, have we?) . Newsom seems to share the ex-governors’ delusion that there are corporations willing to act as “gumdrop fairies”, bringing us colorful and delicious candy (or, in this case, high bandwidth, low cost internet) for free! It turns out, however, that corporations are more known for making a profit than for handing out delicious candy.