Many Americans think of education and transportation as public goods, but they're actually heavily privatized. Here's why that's a problem.

• Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures and the cohost of the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast.
• Recently, he spoke with Donald Cohen of public works policy center In the Public Interest.

Barring a few radical Ayn Rand-style libertarians, most everyone agrees on the importance of public goods. Americans use public parks and libraries, send our kids to public school, and rely on regulations to keep our air, water, and food clean.

But in the latest episode of "Pitchfork Economics," Donald Cohen, the founder and executive director of policy center In the Public Interest, said that the economic definition of what is and isn't a public good is surprisingly narrow.

If you look in an Economics 101 textbook, Cohen said, you'll see the definition of public goods as "non-exclusive and non-rivalrous," meaning an item or service that nobody can be excluded from using and that people and corporations can't economically compete over, like street lights or the English language.

Many fields that ordinary Americans assume to be public goods — public education, libraries, public transportation — don't fit that strict description.

"In that definition, healthcare is a private good, not a public good," Cohen said. "Can we exclude people? Yeah, we sure do — lots of people. In fact, there are only so many hospitals and doctors and nurses, we're learning now, so there's limited supply."

But that's a problem, Cohen said, and the definition of public goods should be broadened and simplified to "the things that we all need and we need everyone to have: education, knowledge, health, clean air, and water, community, parks, libraries."

This is not just quibbling over semantics. In his new book coauthored with Allen Mikaelian, "The Privatization of Everything," Cohen argues that the last half-century has seen private enterprise gobble up government services under the specious argument that if the private sector could theoretically provide a service, it should provide that service.

We're all familiar with the trickle-down claim that under a profit motive, business can provide public goods more efficiently than the government.

Unfortunately, that rarely works out in real life. As an example, Cohen offers privately run charter schools.

"The original idea was [charters would serve as] laboratories of innovation and then share the ideas so that all schools could benefit," Cohen said.

But in practice, "There are charter schools around the country that make their teachers sign nondisclosure agreements to prevent them from sharing the school 'trade secrets.' What are those trade secrets? Lesson plans, teaching methodology," he said — in other words, charter schools hoard and monetize the very "innovations" that they were supposed to contribute to the public good.

In 2005, Senator Rick Santorum tried to privatize publicly owned National Weather Service data by forcing the NWS to stop offering information and forecasts that compete with private-sector companies like AccuWeather. (That's the very same AccuWeather, Politico notes, which "donated thousands of dollars" to Santorum's political campaigns over the years.) President Trump even tried in 2017 to make the former CEO of AccuWeather Barry Myers head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which collects the data that the NWS uses in its forecasts.

"Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver in 2019 uncovered an interview in which current AccuWeather CEO and Founder (and Barry's brother) Joel Myers bragged about how his service benefitted a client — Union Pacific Railroad: "We told [Union Pacific] that a tornado was heading to a spot. Two trains stopped two miles apart, they watched the tornado go in between them. Unfortunately, it went into a town that didn't have our service and a couple dozen people were killed. But the railroads did not lose anything."

Myers's callous dismissal of the death of people who don't pay to use AccuWeather's service is a perfect explanation of why public goods must be protected from corporate plundering.

So is Cohen arguing for socialism? Not at all. "The alternative of private control over public goods is public control over public goods," he said. This doesn't exclude private enterprise from the equation, but it establishes government as the regulator and enforcer of safeguards that ensure the public good is truly being served.

Cohen added that proper regulation would direct for-profit companies toward solving the biggest problems facing America today — income inequality, systemic racism, the erosion of democratic participation — rather than simply excavating our dwindling store of public goods in order to maximize shareholder value.

Ultimately, corporate self-interest may provide efficient and affordable services for consumers who can afford them, but it fails to provide the security and support that an interconnected citizenry requires to function.

"It's in our social interest, democratic interest, and economic interest for every kid to be educated — not just mine — and for everyone to have good healthcare, and not just me," Cohen said.