Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
January 28, 2008
Infrastructure Neglect:
Have The Right And The Left Allied Against The Future?
In the 1950s, America's infrastructure was the envy of the
world, and it was getting better. Plans to build the Dwight D.
Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways, commonly called
the Interstate Highway System, inspired highway projects around the
world. These included the national highway systems of France, Italy, the
United Kingdom and South Africa.
The message was that the Americans knew what they were doing,
and the sensible thing was to emulate them.
At the same time, on farmland in Northern Virginia, the
federal government authorized construction of an international airport
named for the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and designed by
the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. It was an act of faith. From its
opening in 1962 until the early 1980s, Dulles International Airport was
something of a white elephant. But today it has taken its place as one
of the busiest international airports, and the premier airport for
Washington D.C.
It is awesome to contemplate that the politicians and
bureaucrats could have been so farsighted as to build a giant airport in
the belief that the airplanes would come. But those were the days when
people were confident and planners believed that infrastructure was
integral to future prosperity. They only had to look at the railroads,
still largely intact, carrying goods and passengers between cities;
waterways, constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, operating as the
least expensive means of moving heavy loads, and a private bus network
linking villages and towns to the metropolises. The electrification of
rural America, which began in the 1930s, was nearly complete. And in
Shippingport, Pennsylvania, Adm. Hyman Rickover, the father of the
nuclear navy, was building the prototype of a civilian nuclear power
plant.
In the 1960s, the change from major to minor in
infrastructural thinking was sudden and catastrophic. Big government
building was out, local control was in. Transportation projects were
shelved by the thousands, from small local highways to grand urban
bypasses. The Army Corps of Engineers was denounced, nuclear power was
opposed and new transportation initiatives were seen as being at odds
with the integrity of local communities. The first steps toward the
gridlocking of America were taken.
The hostility to growth in the 1960s was initiated and
executed by the left wing, operating through environmentalists, social
reformers, academic dreamers and even the anti-Vietnam War activists and
the women's movement.
Today, the hostility to growth and repair of the
infrastructure comes as much from the right as from the left. The left
sings its old choruses against big public works projects, including
airports, dams, highways, new electric generation and nuclear. Its only
remaining dream from the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt is urban
transportation. And the right? It is singing harmoniously with the left
against the future. Its rationale is different, but the consequences are
the same. The right reasons that governments can do nothing right, and
therefore nothing should be done – and there can be no money for big
projects, because new taxes are an unspeakable evil.
So it is that last week, the Department of Transportation
pulled the plug on a plan to extend Washington's subway system to Dulles
International Airport. There is irony here. The airport was built by
visionaries, and this needed link has been felled by the shortsighted.
The amount of federal money at stake is one-fifth of the total cost of
the project, some $900 million.
This is the picture: There is money to stimulate the economy,
but no money to build the infrastructure that created the economy. The
neo-agrarians of the left and those who have no hope on the right are
allied against the future.
By the way, much of what the government has done over time
has returned enormous dividends for the people - materials from NASA,
dams and ports built by the Army Corps of Engineers. And, yes, the last
gift that big, bad government gave to us was the Internet.
© 2008 North Star
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