Market failure
James from Hobson's Choice is back in the comments, as usual making me think about economics issues.
This is the sort of problem, IMO, that outsourcing is distracting us from: for decades we've allowed huge regions of the nation to fester so that it's virtually impossible to locate new businesses there. Most African American communities suffer from a famine of public services, making it necessary for determined job seekers to commute vast distances and hide where they're from.
But for a long time the telecommunications / information technology (TCIT) sector was flourishing, so many conservative economists argued that globalization was merely restructuring the American economy to export services in TCIT while importing manufactured items. The loss of TCIT jobs is inducing panic because the American public perceives--correctly, IMO--that for SOME reason, nothing is going to replace those lost TCIT jobs.
What neither understood was that the reason America was losing its ability to compete in more and more fields was the inadequate public goods.
You know, I didn't always have the vocabulary for the discussion, but I've always felt I could live with rampant unrestrained market capitalism if the public goods were handled correctly. Which, of course, leads to a discussion of just what "public goods" are.
In fact, what the hell, here's the results I got from Google when I searched up that last link. And if you're REAL lazy, here's how the Economist.com's Research Tool defines public goods:
PUBLIC GOODS
Things that can be consumed by everybody in a society, or nobody at all. They have three characteristics. They are:
• non-rival – one person consuming them does not stop another person consuming them;
• non-excludable – if one person can consume them, it is impossible to stop another person consuming them;
• non-rejectable – people cannot choose not to consume them even if they want to.
Examples include clean air, a national defence system and the judiciary. The combination of non-rivalry and non-excludability means that it can be hard to get people to pay to consume them, so they might not be provided at all if left to MARKET FORCES. Thus public goods are regarded as an example of MARKET FAILURE, and in most countries they are provided at least in part by GOVERNMENT and paid for through compulsory TAXATION. (See also GLOBAL PUBLIC GOODS.)
For myself, and here's the socialist streak that constantly battles the libertarian one, I'd like to add a category of public goods: that, the lack of which, would place ANY citizen at an irreversible disadvantage.
