I just caught a snippet of a program on NPR this morning. The context was America’s decaying infrastructure and they had a history professor on from somewhere or another who praised George Washington for his vision of a national transportation system.
George Washington may well have had a vision of a national transportation system but I’m absolutely confident that by that Washington would have meant post roads and canals. He would not have meant the town streets in Danbury, Connecticut or a bridge over the White River in New Hampshire. Federal tax dollars should be reserved for traffic that is truly interstate—between states—and not for local projects, however worthwhile they might be. The federal government isn’t the only one. There are city, county, and state governments and, however important Cleveland or Peoria are, they’re more important to their Cayuga County, Ohio, Peoria County, and Illinois than they are to the residents of Los Angeles or Augusta, Maine.
That local governments are poor, corrupt, feckless, or even incompetent is no reason that we should place the reasonability for local infrastructure improvements on a federal government in which power has been centralized. The solution to those problems is better local governments not federalization.
