Rickerism

What is the economic theory of shared infrastructure? Surely someone has addressed the theory, but I cannot find it. This particular economic theory will have a far more significant impact on the 21st Century economies that it did in the pass. Thus, I am very eager to find it and study it. Where is it?

The economics of shared infrastructure comes up when discussing monopolies. We are told that governments grant regional monopolies to power utilities because it would be inefficient for competing companies to run multiple power lines down the same street. We are taught that it was a problem in the 19th Century for competing railroads to build tracks down both sides of the same river. This unconstrained competition was somehow harmful. The US Constitution grants the federal government the specific right to build canals and toll roads for interstate commerce. Infrastructure was in the thoughts of the geniuses that founded our capitalist republic.

In capitalism, we are not accustomed to physical limitations. Other economic theories are dominated with physical limitations because they begin with the premise that there are finite resources that must be allotted, all of which leads to Malthusian pessimism and eventual enslavement. In capitalism, resources are infinite because it is the human mind that creates wealth and the human mind is infinite. There may a finite number of rubber trees, but the human mind can create a substitute for rubber. There may be finite sugar fields, but man can create artificial sweeteners.

There may be infinite resources, but there is finite physical space. The infrastructure is finite, the wealth created by sharing the infrastructure is infinite. There are a finite number of fiber optic cables running down the street, but infinite amount of wealth can be created from the information that flows down those cables. The same holds true for power lines, rail lines, road ways, gas lines, waterways, air traffic corridors, sea ports and the electromagnetic spectrum.

Since the Reagan deregulations began in the 1980s, we have begun to see the impact of shared infrastructure. Today, multiple energy companies can sell electricity down the same wire. What is the driving economic theory behind this activity? What is the theoretical role of the infrastructure provider versus the service providers who employ the infrastructure? What are the checks and balances to assure that no party has power equivalent to the threat of force?

If we had a well understood economic theory of shared infrastructure, then we could deregulate the transportation infrastructure of our country the way we have begun to deregulate the power and communications infrastructure. We could privatize the highways. Road ways would shrink and rails would increase in use as the market sought efficiency. Multiple companies could provide service along the same rail line or subway line.

The number one crisis we continue to face as a nation is our energy dependency. We will not transform our state of energy dependency until we have transformed our transportation infrastructure. We will not transform our transportation infrastructure until we enable it to act within the natural forces of capitalism. The federal funding of the Eisenhower highway system has created a subsidy of gross inefficiency that has not only driven our foreign energy dependence but also defaced our landscape with senseless suburban sprawl. We cannot unleash capitalism on our highway and rail systems without a economic theory of shared infrastructure.

An economic theory of shared infrastructure is the fulcrum of change for the US economy of the 21st Century. Now where is the blighted thing?