In 1829, poet Robert Southey proposed a de-industrialised Britain in which increased taxes would be spent on infrastructure projects to boost national well-being. Thomas Babington Macaulay declared Southey’s plan doomed to fail, and began his explanation by saying that private investors take care to judge an infrastructure project on how much the public will use it.

Macaulay pointed out that in the public sector project managers are not affected by bad investments as they are in the private sector. If taxpayers are lucky, their money will go on vanity projects and lining bureaucratic pockets, but outright embezzlement is not out of the question. At any rate, they can expect the lowest quality at the highest price.

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