Michael Hudson — Alluring Infrastructure Income

Well, everybody is in favor of infrastructure. Since the beginning of civilization – starting with the Pyramids, temples and city walls – most of the capital investment in every country of the world, even today, is in infrastructure. That’s why banks, corporations and wealthy investors want to privatize it, because privatizing it is like conquering a new country and being able to take its income.

You can take into your own hands, for your own profit, the largest capital investment there is – what used to be in the public domain. The roads, railroads, airline companies, water and sewer systems and everything that people need, including now the schools can be privatized and instead of providing them to the economy, to make the economy operate at a lower cost, you can make people pay two or three times as much as they were doing. 

Operating this infrastructure for profit (with high-interest credit) will vastly increase the cost of the economy, without increasing wages or the ability to pay for these privatized services. This will squeeze the living standards while sucking up more and more money to the top of the economic pyramid....

Privatization of public assets is a pillar of neoliberalism along with deregulation of finance and business. This is called "liberalization of the economy" in the name of "increasing freedom" by reducing government control of the private sector, which is "socialism."

This was first imposed on Third World countries and then Second World countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the USSR. Now it is being applied with a vengeance to the First World.

Michael Hudson
Alluring Infrastructure Income
Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University