Posted by
Always To The Right on Saturday, December 06, 2008 4:09:33 PM
Barack Obama announced the creation of a massive new public-works program
aimed at updating the nation’s infrastructure while creating millions
of jobs. This comes as no surprise, as Obama and Joe Biden talked
constantly about resurrecting the least-successful elements of FDR’s
New Deal as an answer to the current economic crisis. The new
administration won’t just contain itself to roads, either
Obama invokes both FDR and Eisenhower in his new program. Ike built
the interstate highway system in the 1950s as a national-defense
measure, which most people forget today. The grid of north-south and
east-west highways and bridges didn’t get built as a jobs program, but
as a way to ensure that American military equipment could move rapidly
to the borders of the nation in case of attack. It had the salutory
side effect of enhancing mobility for Americans, most of whom only had
one generation of car ownership at the time.
The key difference between Ike and Obama is that America could
afford that public works project, and its need went further than
creating public-sector jobs for political purposes. We hadn’t sunk
ourselves into tens of trillions in future entitlement liabilities or
trillions of existing debt from previous public-works projects. We
faced an existential threat from the rise of Communist nations who had
already begun invading other nations to expand their sphere of
influence. Eisenhower saw how critical roads and bridges had been in
Europe during the war and wanted to ensure that America was prepared
for the worst.
Now, with the federal government deep in debt, unwilling to address
an entitlement disaster, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars
at private enterprises in a vain attempt to rescue them from their own
bad management and labor practices, Obama wants to create a new WPA to
renew American infrastructure not because it’s needed as much as Obama
needs to ensure his re-election.
The original WPA should serve as an object lesson for us now. It
was bureaucratic, inefficient, and since it served mainly as a
work-to-welfare program, had almost no way of disciplining its
employees to improve production. The massive resources it ate could
have been much more efficiently utilized by the private sector, which
could have produced higher-quality work at a lower price. That has
been the lesson of privatization in infrastructure that we have seen in
Minnesota with the St. Anthony Bridge project and the rebuilding of
Southern California freeways and overpasses after the 1994 Northridge
earthquake.
Furthermore, Obama’s plan falls outside the scope of government in a
big way. The federal government should work on interstate highways and
its bridges, and state governments should remain responsible for their
transportation infrastructure. However, it’s not the government’s
business to order health-care providers to put medical records on the
Internet. In the first place, many of them already do — mine included
— due to pressure from consumers to provide the service. It didn’t
take Obama, a village, or a government bureaucracy to demand it.
Second, some people may not want their medical records on the Internet, which is why my provider has it as an opt-in program.
None of this comes as a great shock, though. While Obama has given
some indications that he doesn’t intend a massive shift to the Left on
defense and foreign policy, his economic plans have always favored
statism, class warfare, and a striking ignorance of history and
reality. Recreating the WPA and proposing even more massive spending
programs in the face of our precarious financial condition and debt
load finds its equivalent only perhaps in the apocryphal fiddling of
Nero while Rome burned.
Obama Plans Largest Public Construction Program Since 1950s...