Private Profits, Public Liabilities

The Economist, Historian, and Diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith coined the phase "private affluence and public squalor" in his 1958 book The Affluent Society. The public squalor is most visible in the decline of essential public investment in our critical national infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers puts the deficit in infrastructure investment at $2.2 trillion this year, up $1.7 trillion from 2007.

Galbraith's observation shows up in many parts of our daily lives - even the mail. The USPS transportation fleet of about a quarter of a million vehicles consumes very large amounts of gasoline and produces tons of emissions into the air. It is also vastly more resource-intensive to print, carry, deliver, and dispose of paper-and-ink messages than electronic ones. Galbraith's point being - the health and environmental costs of all that pollution are not paid by the USPS (One can only assume that if U.S. taxpayers really knew how much they themselves are subsidizing the junk mail that annoys them daily, they would feel even worse about the cumulative environmental impact), just as air and water pollution often isn't paid for by the industrial companies that produce it. In market economies, profits tend to be private and liabilities public.