The impending multibillion-dollar infrastructure deal between the Biden administration and the Senate Republicans has been hailed as welcome bipartisan cooperation that augurs well for the revitalization of this nation’s aging infrastructure—and for improving the lives of many Americans. This narrative plays so well because the term “infrastructure” now carries a seal of approval. Private expenditures may be suspect as greedy, but not public expenditures.

The great appeal of the term “infrastructure” is that it helps bridge the divide between classical liberal and modern progressive attitudes toward government spending. The most thoughtful students of laissez-faire economics do not limit permissible government actions to the prevention of force and fraud and the enforcement of private agreements. They also believe that government intervention is often needed to provide those collective facilities—such as roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, communications, and pipelines—that cannot be put together solely through coordinated private investment.

Many of these operations are long and skinny and thus presuppose the ability to assemble land from multiple owners, who in the absence of a threat of condemnation could hold out for higher prices that doom all collective projects.