In his latest Washington Post column George Will laments that today’s U. S. is incapable of “great building feats”:
Construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge took four years in the 1930s, but after a 1989 earthquake, when one-third of the Bay Bridge had to be replaced, the project took over two decades. A nation planning to quickly spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure should wonder why the repair proceeded so sluggishly — and why economists have found that the inflation-adjusted cost of building a mile of the interstate highway system tripled between the 1960s and 1980s.
The Claremont Institute’s William Voegeli considers this evidence of “activist government’s dysfunction†— government’s inability, or unwillingness, to do one thing at a time. Government cannot simply repair a bridge; it must do so while complying with an ever-thickening, sometimes immobilizing web of ever-multiplying environmental, labor, safety and other mandates. They also now include, as part of what Voegeli calls the Biden administration’s “shock-and-awe statism,†Washington’s obsession with “equity†— racial distributions of government goods and services.
Remember Barack Obama’s 2010 epiphany about the nonexistence of his promised “shovel-ready†projects? According to Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge in “Capitalism in America: A History†(2018), “Today bigger highway projects take a decade just to clear the various bureaucratic hurdles before workers can actually get to work.â€
I think that’s what’s called in the trade an invidious comparison. For one thing it’s comparing apples and oranges. The federal government was only tangentially involved in the construction of the Bay Bridge. It wasn’t even a state project. It was a local project. It was financed by bonds approved by voters in San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, and Del Norte Counties. It’s a good example of a point I’ve made before: people are frequently willing to pay for the things they need and they themselves are the best judges of the things that they need.
As to whether the United States is capable of great building feats today I have one word for you: Starlink. That was largely paid for by funding provided by the FCC.
No NIMBY as yet in low earth orbit. No environmental impact studies.
How is the FCC paying for Starlink?
An appropriation for rural broadband connectivity. Ultimately, of course, it’s by the Federal Reserve expanding its balance sheets and issuing credit.
We have the technical ability to do large, high tech projects, but they have to be done in a miasma of regulations, NIMBY activists, taxes, etc. It is the regulatory environment that holds us back. It is also producing an economy that is in decline. Add wokism to that, and our actual technical skills will decline. The crisis will arrive when the Chinese and other foreigners decide they no longer have to send their young men and women to our STEM programs, because their own are better.
You might note that German and Japanese engineering students are rare in our STEM programs. They don’t even need to learn English.
What do you expect all those lawyers to do? Sit on their hands?
Those bills to pay for law school don’t pay themselves you know.
Looking at Starlink business — if it fulfills its promised specs Starlink is such a difference maker people would pay the unsubsidized price. And it has many uses besides rural broadband. i.e. I believe it would be business success without a single penny from the FCC. If anything, its NASA who deserve credit by funding the rocket technology of SpaceX; the FCC’s role was giving the regulatory permission to launch the rockets.