Re:Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism....
by maerF0x0 on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @03:28PM
(#36868046)
maybe I'm not fully understanding your point, or public accounting, but it seems me that if government followed this order of operations
1. Collected sufficient taxes (ie money) to pay for a work 2. Built the work spending down the money 3. counted the work as an asset on the public balance sheet (ie, we own the pipes)
Wouldn't that mean no debt and not selling it off to corporations?
Public assets (roads, sewers, other kinds of infrastructure) are always going to be "debt" in the myopic accounting from the perspective of the government. Requiring zero debt means selling these assets off to (presumably private) entities, which sounds like a terrible idea for reasons aligned closely with the kinds of arguments found in Doctorow's blog post.