Hickenlooper, the Olympics, and the folly of corporate financing

Gov. John Hickenlooper recently said on Colorado Public Radio that he counts potential increased population growth as the only downside to a possible Denver bid for the Winter Olympics. And he touted private corporate financing only as an answer to concerns about spending public monies on Olympic infrastructure.

I would count corporate sponsorship of expenditure that should be filling public needs as a downside in itself. By their nature, for-profit firms are motivated by profit, not by the desire to provide socially optimal quantities and qualities of goods and services to the population. Transportation, communication, health, education, law enforcement, low-income housing and other social supports are classified as public goods and services because they benefit entire broad communities, including indirect beneficiaries. Because excluding people from these benefits is costly or impossible, private firms are not repaid for the full community benefit conferred by providing them, so firms undersupply them.

We are already reaping the wasteland of an increasingly privatized government, having handed over far too much public investment to corporations. Let’s not hand over more public power and responsibility to corporations. It isn’t what they’re good at. Send letters of 150 words or fewer to openforum@denverpost.com or 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 800, Denver, CO, 80202. Please include full name, city and phone number. Contact information is for our purposes only; we will not share it with anyone else. You can reach us by telephone at 303-954-1331.