It’s a bad idea to borrow from oneself

The federal government, it is well known, is determined to spend $120 billion on infrastructure over the next 10 years. If traditional definitions of infrastructure are insufficient to get it to that sum, then by God it will come up with whole new definitions.

Ah, but whose money? From what source? The government would appear to have three alternatives. One, it can pay for it out of each year’s taxes. Two, it can borrow on private credit markets. Or three, it can finance capital projects like roads and bridges by charging the people who use them. Once these would have been known as user fees or road tolls; in the language of today’s technocrats, it’s called “asset monetization” or “asset recycling.”

Governments at every level and of every stripe have been showing increasing interest in this option, and with good reason. Pricing scarce resources encourages consumers to make more sparing use of them, while confining ambitious politicians and bureaucrats to providing services people actually want and are willing to pay for.

Moreover, by charging users where possible, scarce tax dollars are freed up to pay for the things that can only be paid for through taxes: public goods, like defence, policing and lighthouses.

Of course, if it is possible to charge users, it raises the question of whether the service need be pro- vided, or at least financed, by the state at all. Rather than front the capital for a project themselves, governments can open it to private investors to finance, in return for some or all of the revenues expected to flow from it. As with user fees, this need not be limited to new ventures: “asset recycling” can also mean selling existing government enterprises — what used to be called “privatization.”

Again, there’s much to recommend this. If a project can be financed privately, it usually should, as this provides a truer measure of the cost of capital. (This point eludes many people: since the government has the best credit and pays the lowest interest rate, they ask, doesn’t it make sense to borrow on its account? But by that reasoning we should get the government to borrow on everybody’s behalf. If not, then it is privileging some investments over others, in the same way as if it were to directly subsidize them, and subject to the same critiques.)

The further removed from government, moreover, the less the chances of politicization. There’s a reason we set up Crown corporations at arm’s length from the government of the day, in the hopes of insulating them from politicallyminded meddling.

Privatization simply takes that one step further. At the same time, a company in private hands can be regulated in a more disinterested fashion, without the inherent conflict of interest of a government, in effect, regulating itself. Last, experience teaches that when people own something directly, and have an interest in its value, they tend to take better care of it — whereas when the state owns something, no one does.

Yet government and private sector alike are too willing to blur this distinction. Rather than simply put a project out to private tender, with investors bearing all of the risk in return for all of the profit, public and private capital are frequently commingled. All too often, this means public risk for private profit.

That, alas, seems where we are headed — with an extra twist of malignancy. For, as the Canadian Press recently reported, the “private” investors the feds have their eyes on are in fact the country’s public pension plans, notably the Canada Pension Plan’s $283-billion investment fund and Quebec’s Caisse de dépot et placement — much as the Ontario government had earlier suggested it would use its planned provincial equivalent.

This is a truly terrible idea. On the one hand, it offers governments a way to finance their spending on the quiet, without subjecting their plans to the scrutiny of either the credit markets or Parliament. On the other hand, it opens pension funds to pressure to invest in ways that may not be in the best interest of pensioners, but rather of their political “partners.”

I know, I know: the public pension plans are independent of government, at arms’ length, and all that. But the history of the Caisse is rather less than reassuring in this regard, while the presence of the CEOs of both the Caisse and the CPP Investment Board on the Finance minister’s new economic advisory council does not quite scream independence.

Even more disquieting is the Caisse’s latest venture, a $5.5-billion light rail project in Montreal, of which the Caisse itself would put up a little more than half — with the remainder, it hopes, to come from the federal and provincial governments.

Is it too hard to imagine, in the negotiations to come, the governments in question suggesting a little quid pro quo: we’ll fund yours if you’ll fund ours?

Well now. If I lend you $100 and you lend me $100, are either of us $1 better off ? Now suppose you and I are basically the same person, and you have some idea of the nonsense involved here. The pension plans will fund government infrastructure projects with the money they make on investments funded in part by governments out of the return on investments that were financed by the pension plans and so on ad infinitum.

A government that borrows from others acquires a liability, but a government that borrows from itself may be accounted a calamity.

IT OFFERS GOVERNMENTS A WAY TO FINANCE THEIR SPENDING ON THE QUIET, WITHOUT SUBJECTING THEIR PLANS TO ... SCRUTINY. — COLUMNIST ANDREW COYNE