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Well-crafted and -enforced regulations are intended to align corporate behavior with the interests of humans, but the last half century or so of privatized power, water, and telecommunications, in the U.S. and elsewhere has made clear that they are simply no match for the corrosive incentives of profit. So rather than using regulations as an arm's-length tool of corporate over-sight, essential infrastructural systems should be funded and managed as community-owned systems. If they can only be made profitable through the exploitation of consumers, then they should instead be treated as what they are, an investment in the public good. If they're only profitable because the costs of environmental, social, and other harms are externalized rather than considered and addressed, including those resulting from insufficient maintenance, then those "profits" need to go toward mitigating those harms instead of to shareholders. For all the manifold ways that public infrastructure has fallen short in the past two centuries, there is at least a trajectory toward incorporating these broader ideals. Only community-led networks, whether publicly owned or non-profit cooperatives, even have the potential to incorporate broad-based accountability, long-term thinking, and an ethos of meeting needs. And if it's possible to have a well-functioning utility provider that serves all residents equitably, that's embedded in a healthy enveronment, and still turns a profit? All the more reason for it to be public.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 260)

The issues with infrastructure-for-profit become even more profound it we look toward what it will take to have functioning infrastructural systems for the next century or so. To begin with, no corporation has any interest in the well-being of our descendants twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now, even as potential customers, because the profit motive is fundamentally incompatible with long-term thinking. Investor-owned companies have no interest in creating nonmonetary benefits or positive externalities, other than incidentally, and they are incentivized to ignore negative externalities.except when legally required to address them. Profit-seeking is at odds with maintenance and reliability in the present, and it'll be incompatible with resilience and sustainability in the future.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 259)

With a strictly economic viewpoint, leaving anything on the table today - any resources unextracted - is a lost opportunity. To capitalism, sustainability always looks like underutilization.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 257)

...we know that making a personal decision, like deciding to leave the car at home or replace the gas furnace in our house with a heat pump, doesn't necessarily help anyone else make the sane decision, and because these are collective systems, our individual contribution is minuscule. Many of us have come to the disheartening conclusion that, no matter how great our individual sacrifice of time, money, or energy, no matter how much we radically change our own lives and homes in order to reduce our personal emissions, we can't move the needle alone.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 191)