Did you drive on a road today? Drink tap water? Walk over a bridge? There’s a good chance some (or all) of that infrastructure is crumbling. When left neglected, this decay happens over years or decades, away from sight, failing catastrophically on some unknown date. Recent water main failures in Calgary and Montreal caused millions of dollars in flooding damage and threatened water security for entire neighbourhoods. Failures in bridges, sewage, and gas infrastructure can and will kill workers and poison the environment. Replacing our urgently broken water and transportation infrastructure will cost $250 billion. To replace it all will cost $2.6 trillion. This doesn’t include all the new things we need to build for a growing population.
How can an “advanced” economy allow this? As capitalism decays so does its ability to upkeep its infrastructure. Even though the economy can’t operate without these systems, investment in it is not tangibly profitable. Investing in water distribution will take billions and billions of dollars and will not make any individual capitalist richer in a measurable way. But capitalism will reap what it sows: recent anti-government protests in Serbia involving hundreds of thousands were catalyzed by the roof of a train station collapsing and killing 14 people. Similar explosions can and will happen here. A system which cannot guarantee even the most basic features of a modern society does not deserve to exist.
