Mariana Mazzucato Quotes

Privatization of assets that most of us consider public goods - like airports and highways - has a long, often-uncontroversial history.

Government is inevitably going to play a very significant role in infrastructure, and in a country with a federal system where vibrancy and economic health depend on interstate commerce, it's not going to be private enterprise or state governments that will give you things like an interstate highway system.

One answer is that the town's elected officials thought that the project served a public purpose and that the various subsidies and favors were worth the price. But they may or may not have thought this.

The northern and western companies of inland lock navigation, having, agreeably to law, produced authentic accounts of their expenditures, I have given the necessary certificate to entitle them to receive from the Treasury the sum of ten thousand pounds, as a free gift on the part of this State towards the prosecution of those interesting objects. Although the care of improving and opening these navigations be committed to private companies, they will require, and no doubt from time to time receive, from the Legislature, every fostering aid and patronage commensurate to the great public advantages which must result from the improvement of the means of intercourse

The tolls for the maintenance of a high road, cannot with any safety be made the property of private persons.

A healthy national infrastructure requires not just competent engineers but also a government—and a public—willing to pay for it.

Infrastructure done right can help working people; infrastructure done wrong is just more money for private equity.

I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.

President Obama has almost doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing. And yet, what do we have to show for it? Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are Third World condition, and forty-three million Americans are on food stamps.

Tax reduction has an almost irresistible appeal to the politician, and it is no doubt also gratifying to the citizen. It means more dollars in his pocket, dollars that he can spend if inflation doesn't consume them first. But dollars in his pocket won't buy him clean streets or an adequate police force or good schools or clean air and water. Handing money back to the private sector in tax cuts and starving the public sector is a formula for producing richer and richer consumers in filthier and filthier communities. If we stick to that formula we shall end up in affluent misery.

When I talk about how we're going to pay for education, how we're going to invest in infrastructure, how we're going to get the cost of prescription drugs down, and a lot of the other issues that people talk to me about all the time, I've made it very clear we are going where the money is. We are going to ask the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share.

Too many politicians seem to reach for 'infrastructure' as the default answer to investment, as if roads and bridges were the answer to everything. Even the IMF and the World Bank seem to mainly offer infrastructure spending as an alternative to austerity, although they are right to focus on the need for investment.

There's nothing magic about spending on tanks and bombs rather than roads and bridges.

When the government says we're going to build something on behalf of the community, we do it.

Government should support - and benefits from - economic development and settlement. The oft-used analogy of building highways and supporting infrastructure - not driving the vehicles or the industry - fits.

One answer to transportation infrastructure funding is public-private partnerships.

Those in the metro-Atlanta area know how crucial the investments in our infrastructure and transportation systems are to improving our communities.

I don't think I could advocate for increasing NASA's budget by a factor of two or ten, because I want us to have good roads in our country. I want us to have good education in our country. And NASA's budget is part of a discretionary budget, and we can't make that bigger without taking away other things.

Sometimes you have to invest in people to get the best out of them. To me, that is socialism. That is why I'm a Labour member rather than a Conservative.

We know how to build economies. It requires investment in jobs. The biggest medium-term multiplier is infrastructure.

For her part, the Church always works for the integral development of every person. In this sense, she reiterates that the common good should not be simply an extra, simply a conceptual scheme of inferior quality tacked onto political programmes. The Church encourages those in power to be truly at the service of the common good of their peoples.

“Governments accountable to the voters focus on building roads and schools—not weapons of mass destruction.”

We are a debtor nation, our airports are third world, our highways are falling apart. Our roads, our bridges, everything, we're like third world.

The powers contained in a constitution...ought to be construed liberally in advancement of the public good.

The corporation was originally conceived as a public institution whose purpose was to serve national interests and advance the public good.