(FORTUNE Magazine) – The news that the Massachusetts Turnpike might be privatized triggered unfond memories for the present writer, who has personally been keen to overturn the management of this toll road ever since Labor Day of 1966. That was the infamous date on which he ran out of gas on the M.T. just about the same time the tots ran out of Pepsi, a disastrous coincidence arguably blamable on the paucity of filling stations attributable to socialist mismanagement. Privatizing turnpikes is not something done every day in the U.S., but there is a devastatingly logical case for privatizing infrastructure nowadays. The case rests partly on the familiar proposition that private managers manage better. But in an era when Massachusetts is not the only state government feeling broke, the case for privatization also incorporates the thought that private investors are a better bet than Statehouse politicians to raise the money to build and maintain roads and bridges. Ideas along these lines have recently been percolating out of the governor's office in Boston, where Republican Bill Weld seems to be motivated in about equal measure by economic logic and political nausea. His queasiness centers on the fact that the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority is a patronage palace that continues to be run by Dukakisites. (Democrats will apparently retain their majority on the MTA's board of directors until 1996.) By all accounts, including those of the dependably statist Boston Globe, which opposes privatization, the Turnpike Authority is a great place for a politician's nephew to find work. The state inspector general noted bitterly in a recently published report that in proportion to its size, the Turnpike Authority offers 4 1/2 times more over-$60,000 jobs than the state highway agency. Even more emetic from a Republican perspective is the evident unwillingness of the MTA to go out of business. As originally set up, the agency was supposed to liquidate itself and turn its operations over to a state public works administration when all its bonded debt had been paid off. With liquidation time only a few years away, the MTA board decided in 1990 to issue more bonds for maintenance. The view among the Weldites is that the agency has deliberately kept itself poor, and therefore in need of more borrowings, by pumping up its own head count and endlessly overpaving the road. Fiendish plot, eh? The MTA has annual revenues running around $135 million, 90% from toll collections, the rest mainly from investment income and concessions. The true profitability of the enterprise is hard to gauge, given present management's incentives to spend every available nickel; in addition, nobody yet knows the terms of the contract the state would sign with whoever won the franchise. But Wall Street evidently rates the profit potential high. Investment bankers Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette say the firm would like to bid on the property and expects to deliver an offer in the $500 million to $1 billion zone while also absorbing $177 million of outstanding debt -- which implies that DLJ believes annual privatized profits could be $80 million or more. The American Trucking Association is also interested in bidding. The Globe said recently that the turnpike is worth $2 billion or more and warned of ''a giveaway sale . . . simply to satisfy a fashionable lust for privatization.'' But the $2 billion figure was derived simply by adjusting past land and construction costs for inflation, a procedure violating the rule that sunk costs are irrelevant to values. It does seem true, however, that Weld lusts to privatize. There is talk that the turnpike is just the beginning, that Logan Airport in Boston could be next, that any state properties not nailed down could be on the block soon enough. Surprising quite a few politicians, the governor is emerging as a libertarian conservative and is said (by the Wall Street Journal) to revere the works of F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. Whether plunging Moody's ratings will convert other politicians to libertarian doctrine is an interesting question these days, especially if you are a politician's nephew.