>Companies and private moguls wont create good infrastructure out of charity, and what little they will create, it will be created to be milked as much as possible, and milked as much as possible. Think cost-cutting and short/mid-term profit, not vision and future thinking.
How is that meaningfully different to what NYC and NY have been doing themselves with regards to infrastructure? Crossing the George Washington Bridge costs $10.50. There's so much congestion all throughout but legislatures are happy to sit on the laurels of infrastructure investments many decades ago instead of aggressively building more, thus deepening income inequality.
This is essentially what Marc Andreesen's point was in his "build" essay. Most local governments have gotten stuck in a perfect storm of rentier interests, environmental regulation barriers, union disputes, lack of public interest, etc. I guess it's a kind of short-termism, with each interest group looking out for its constituents. And there are too many interest groups at too many levels.
There's a great analysis of transportation infrastructure costs that came out in the New Yorker, as part of a story on the new head of the NYMTA, Andy Byford (Bynum?). The bottomline is that we can't blame any specific political section, like saying that it's all the unions' fault, or all because we regulate the environment too much. Other OECD countries have the same concerns, in terms of protecting worker safety and the environment. But in the US, the number of competing groups has gotten past some critical point that it's making the whole system move way too slowly.
How is that meaningfully different to what NYC and NY have been doing themselves with regards to infrastructure? Crossing the George Washington Bridge costs $10.50. There's so much congestion all throughout but legislatures are happy to sit on the laurels of infrastructure investments many decades ago instead of aggressively building more, thus deepening income inequality.