White Paper: How to Fix America’s Crumbling Infrastructure — Lessons from Australia

U.S. infrastructure is often characterized as “crumbling,” D-grade, or, at the very least, in need of much improvement.

The term “infrastructure” has no universally accepted meaning in economics or elsewhere, but it usually carries with it particular characteristics, such as being capital intensive, with large, long-lived and sunk cost characteristics; publicly consumed in the commons with externality and public good qualities; and government-centric in terms of funding, planning, and heavy-handed regulation.

Darren Brady Nelson is an Austrian school economist who serves as the chief economist at LibertyWorks and as an associate scholar with the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. He is also a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.