This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 20, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Trump administration's plans for infrastructure involve a limited focus on privatization.

Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute,

discusses the opportunities for privatization not yet explored from the Postal Service to passenger rail to airports.

The idea of privatization often comes up because people want the government to sell stuff

to raise money to reduce the federal deficit.

And that's one reason, but the more important reason is that the government doesn't use

its assets very well.

Congress micromanages things like the post office and the passenger rail system when the government owns it.

So we want to privatize to improve efficiency to get congressional micromanagement out of these infrastructure assets like Amtrak.

And also we want entrepreneurs to come in and reform the postal system.

Right now the postal system, for example, is a legal monopoly.

Entrepreneurs are not allowed to try to do a better job delivering the mail.

So we ought to privatize the postal system and open it up to competition.

All right, so what can be privatized that is under the federal government's purview?

A lot of stuff, more than you would think. The Tennessee

Valley Authority, a giant electric utility owned by the federal government that

covers seven states. Land, the federal government owns a quarter of the entire

continent size of the United States.

Buildings, the federal government owns 275,000 buildings, believe it or not.

The Postal Service, as we mentioned, Amtrak the passenger rail company, dams in the West.

There's no reason why hydroelectric dams ought to be owned by the federal government.

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