Rediscovering Public Goods

In February, Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker proposed a new $20 million program to provide for publicly owned and operated grocery stores as a way to combat the problem of "food deserts" and the difficulties many rural communities and historically disinvested communities have in accessing fresh and healthy foods. Meanwhile, California is embarking on a major new initiative to produce and supply its own insulin for California residents, under the CalRx program, to make critical drugs cheaper and easier to access. At the national level, in recent years we have seen major new experiments with the Child Tax Credit and now with a new effort by the IRS to provide its own publicly run tax-filing program. All of these experiments point to a rich and urgently needed rediscovery of a critical policy tool: public options and public provisioning of vital goods and services. Across sectors and issue areas, this revival of interest in public goods, public options, and public provisioning represents an essential dimension of our broader effort to build a more just, equitable, inclusive, and dynamic economy and society. 

While we may be used to thinking of public goods in a narrow economistic sense—as those goods whose provisions are nonrival and nonexcludable—the provision of public goods more broadly is better thought of as an essential component of social and economic freedom.  We should think of “public goods” as those goods and services that are essential for human and communal flourishing: not just clean air and water or roads and bridges but also childcare, healthcare, and the like. The provision of these goods and services enables individuals and communities to thrive. Conversely, limiting access to these goods and services essentially defines second-class citizenship: communities and individuals unable to access cheap (or free) and quality versions of these goods and services face, as a result, significant additional frictions and challenges than those with readier access do not. 

Consider a few examples. In the mid-nineteenth century, industrialization made gas lines, electricity, and running water more commonplace and increasingly essential utilities for daily life. Yet in many municipalities, these services were initially run by private corporate entities. In a growing number of court cases, communities argued that these private utilities were acting in a quintessentially public manner: providing a good or service essential to the public. Even more dangerously, the fact that these private actors remained unconstrained by the checks and balances needed in a democracy meant that they could raise prices or cut off access at a whim—the essence of arbitrary, tyrannical control between the utility and the community, and diametrically at odds with the core moral values of democracy and equality. Today, we see similar arguments deployed in fights over public provision of healthcare and over the structure of other essential services like childcare and internet access. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that throughout American history we have a long track record of privatizing or otherwise limiting access to public goods and public services, precisely as a way of reasserting racialized, gendered, and classist forms of hierarchy.  

The essential nature of a good or service need not mean that it should be exclusively provided by the state; the “publicness” of a core good or service might be a reason to deploy a range of institutional strategies, including exclusive public provision; providing a public option alongside private actors; or regulating private actors as “public utilities” subject to rules of nondiscrimination, cheap fares, and basic quality of service. 

This vision of public goods provision is more than just theory; it is increasingly a central area of innovation and experimentation in public policy. Getting from here to there will require building on these areas of activity. 

First, there is a growing and robust experimentation with direct public provision of essential goods and services at the state and local level: Illinois’s experiments with public groceries; CalRX and the effort to provide public generic drugs; municipalities experimenting with broadband provision and job guarantees; and more. 

Second, the COVID-19 crisis spurred an important moment of federal experimentation as well. The Biden administration’s use of the Defense Production Act and related efforts to procure essential components (including, at the height of the pandemic, more robust supplies of personal protective equipment like masks) revived an old legal authority and provided valuable experience in how the federal government can and must take a proactive approach to structuring supply chains and ensuring the ready production of essential goods and services. 

Third, we see a growing movement to “republicize” public utilities that have, over the last 50 years, been turned into investor-owned utilities that serve primarily to extract fees and enrich investors rather than serve the public. This is one of the undercurrents of growing dissatisfaction with electric utilities that have not only been imposing high prices and uneven service on the public but also increasingly seem to bear a significant amount of responsibility for lax protocols, thereby exacerbating the risks of electricity failures and wildfires in California, Hawaii, and elsewhere, stemming from mismanagement of the energy infrastructure. By contrast, movements at the state and local level seek to regain public control and accountability for these nominally public entities. 

Fourth, conventional approaches to the safety net are also being reimagined at the federal, state, and local levels to move from a skeptical, punitive model of welfare provision to one that is universal, accessible, and premised on the idea that everyone should be able to access basic supports that empower and enable them to thrive. Thus, the brief COVID-era experiment with a federal Child Tax Credit proved to be one of the most dramatically effective efforts at child poverty reduction in history. Similarly, current efforts to expand broadband access and streamline the administration of existing federal safety net efforts from disaster relief to support for new mothers highlight a sea change in the philosophy of safety net design and administration.

Each of these areas of possibility offer a starting point for a more expansive vision of public provision that can address many of the systemic inequities in our economy and society. Making these experiments successful will require a greater level of collaboration among policymakers, advocates, communities, engineers, experts, and more. 

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