SELLING THE FAMILY SILVERWARE? An editorial in USA Today objects to revenue-strapped governments selling infrastructure.

Water utilities have been among the most controversial items up for sale, but other public services are also on the block as state and local governments hope to balance budgets by auctioning off public bridges, highways and airports. Last year, Indiana's toll road was sold to a foreign consortium for $3.8 billion in the largest highway privatization deal in U.S. history. Other public properties under consideration for sale: Chicago's Midway International Airport, the New Jersey Turnpike and the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

The premises the authors state in a preceding paragraph seem like an odd basis for challenging a privatization.

Falling bridges, collapsing levees, bursting pipes, sewage spills, failing electrical grids — this short list of major infrastructure failures in just the past few years might lead one to think that there's a conspiracy, that terrorists are taking down our public services and tax-built assets.

But it turns out that we are doing it to ourselves, first by underinvesting in our water, transportation and energy systems, and then by trying to solve the problem by auctioning off these assets in a fire sale to the highest private bidder.

There is a potential problem with such fire sales, if the highest bidder has too optimistic an expectation either of the future revenues from the property or of the expenditures required to put the property in shape, the premise being that governments are selling off deteriorated properties. (Chicago's Mayor Daley gets this point.) Such optimism might have figured in Stockton, California's recently reversed privatization of a water utility.

Citizen watchdog groups had also reported that the private company had adopted a "run-to-fail" approach to preventive maintenance. "Employees were feeling frustrated that they couldn't maintain the facilities the way they had previously," said Stockton City Council member Susan Eggman.

(That is, if one can speak with a straight face about any water works in the heavily-subsidized West being a private enterprise.) The substantive point might be nothing more than a very technical issue, the efficient level of maintenance. The private owner might have viewed the pre-existing maintenance activity as the equivalent of gold-plating. Alternatively, the owner might have been wasting the asset, raising the possibility that the privatization was not well done.

It's not clear, however, that public management of roads, airports, and waterworks has lived up to the authors' expectations.

Instead, what is required is a new commitment by citizens and government to rebuild our infrastructure so that our water and other essential services remain in the public domain to be managed for the benefit of all citizens, and not for the profit of a few.

The problem, dear reader, is that government has not managed public properties for the benefit of all citizens, which makes the privatizers' case a little easier. (Short form: the bidder claims to do no worse.)

There is, however, one deeper problem with these privatizations. The lease of the Indiana Toll Road, for example, appears to be a way for the state to meet some current expenses. Once there is no more silverware to sell ...