I think the good faith version of the scheme is that not every billion invested produces the same amount of goods and services as every other billion. E.g. a billion invested in a luxury yacht-building shipyard compared to a billion invested in high-speed rail. The yach shipyard produce few goods/services for very small group of people. The high-speed rail produces goods/services for a lot of people and businesses. If you take the materialist perspective that the wealth a nation has, constitutes of all the goods/services we produce, then if we take billion from airports, put it in developing or expanding some other activity that produces more goods/services for us, we get more g/s. And then the good faith bet would be that the value/quantity of those would be higher than the value lost from the higher cost from the profit the new airport operator will get (and possibly exfiltrate abroad). Are the new investments gonna do that? I don't know. I am skeptical for a set of reasons. Either way we're getting less airport for our money in the (not too) long term as you suggested.