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That, indeed, was the model that seemed to be on sale in the past federal election. The Liberals promised tens of billions of new infrastructure investment. That was why, we were told, the Liberals proposed to go into deficit — not to spend, but to invest — which was sold as traditional Keynesian pump-priming, to counter the recession the Liberals insisted we were then in.

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At no time was it suggested in any of this that in fact it might not be the government doing the borrowing, or that most of the “investing” would be years in the future. And certainly no one was told the government planned to privatize the nation’s airports, or to start charging users for services they had been accustomed to getting for “free,” i.e. through their taxes.

So I have a shred of sympathy for those critics who are now howling at yet another bit of Liberal deception. On the other hand, well, the whole thing was a bit of a lie, wasn’t it? The recession, the deficit numbers, the notion that most or even much of it was for infrastructure, even by the Liberals’ elastic definition of the word, or that any of this was going to “kickstart” a two-trillion-dollar economy.

And unlike the Liberals’ original plan, this one’s mostly a pretty good idea. Any funds raised by private capital are funds the government does not have to borrow; fees paid by users are revenues that don’t have to be raised from taxpayers. So it’s just a wash, then? What we gain as taxpayers we lose as users? No, because the two are not equivalent. Some things, such as defence and other “public goods,” can be paid for only with taxes — there’s no way to charge users even if one wanted to. But where a thing can be paid for with user fees, it makes sense to do so, rather than use up scarce tax dollars that might have been used to pay for things that only taxes can pay for.