Gary King

What Is It?

Wikipedia defines a public good as a concept in economics that is :

[...] also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] [is] a commodity, product or service that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous and which is typically provided by a government and paid for through taxation.

That's just an overly fancy way of saying something very simply and plainly, a universal theme that’s repeated over and over again, across time, cultures, and religions: We're all connected. We're all involved in one, big, giant group project, together. Not just as individuals in silos but together, amongst communities of care and collaboration.

Through our collective efforts, it is we the people who manifest the infinite things around us we can see, touch, hold, use. Roads, schools, hospitals, libraries, fire departments, public parks, green spaces, daycare, clean and plentiful water supplies, and more: Public goods—tangible, useful things we all rely on and that no one person or entity has a monopoly on over another individual or group.

An essential aspect of public goods is that the fruits and bounty of our collective labor—historically in theory, at least, if no longer in practice—should be divvied up and shared in more-or-less, equal ways that ostensibly minimize overly large gaps in material wealth and resources, regardless of ability, race, creed, religion, color, or contribution. And while our actual ability to implement this idea has waxed and waned over the years, the historical record is one characterized by groups of people fighting entire revolutions largely united in the belief that the attempt to secure lives of dignity for all is a worthwhile one.

Why It Matters

Understanding that peoples around the world throughout history have existed in community with one another and worked to build better lives together through mutually shared time, energy, and resources frees us to better scrutinize modern day politics, in order to meaningfully identify alternative pathways outside the binary, political frames and labels in which we often find ourselves trapped living in this present-day era of extremely high, negative partisanship.

Unfortunately, public goods in America, for decades now, have perpetually been the objects of constant attack, diminishment, scorn, and lies by bad-faith actors in our public square, their true role and purpose in society distorted beyond recognition by a politics of fear and othering and scarcity. 

Government and the policies we pursue on behalf of the public are and can only be as good as the stewards of that work who are doing (or not doing) their jobs. If people don’t fight for the things that matter, then the things that matter, ultimately, just won’t get done. And if the underlying premise of a public good is a good one and we as people have a long, storied history of creating them together for the betterment of all—why can't government by extension, be a force for good?  The answer is, it can be.

Good Public Good is a rejection of the implicit premise that a lot of our public discourse is often based on these days, that social safety nets are somehow a lazy-person’s, undeserved, easy-way-out. It's a sincere attempt at cutting through the noise of a broken media and political landscape by centering public goods, not personalities or political parties, as our primary focus. Public goods aren't left or right, Republican or Democrat. They're what we consistently do with our time and energy towards a better life for all.

Public goods offer us an affirmative argument for good government, rather than tired, reductive frames that rely on bootstraps and scarcity discourse to blame and scapegoat the working class and poor in favor of the deserving few who work hard and aren't lazy.