Infrastructure Policy: Lessons From American History
sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com
For the last several years, dating back to the Iraq War’s low point, it has been the vogue to speak of “nation-building at home.” It is intended as a pun: usually when we talk about “nation-building” we mean the work of establishing in other countries the institutions and values necessary for political stability. Those who speak of “nation-building at home” imply that the cost of overseas interventions has left the United States in a condition of disrepair. They suggest that money being spent abroad would be better spent on domestic projects, including on a more literal kind of nation-building — the construction and repair of roads, railroads, bridges, dams, pipelines, and the other elements of infrastructure.
The question of infrastructure (or “internal improvements,” or “public works”) has bedeviled the nation since its founding. Problems of infrastructure policy drove George Washington, James Madison, and others to form our constitutional system of government — nation-building in the truest sense. In the antebellum era, a young John C. Calhoun urged his fellow congressmen to “bind the Republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals.” In the early industrial euphoria, railroads broke the states and then rebuilt the nation. In the darkest hours of the Depression, FDR designed a public-works program “to put more men back to work, both directly on the public works themselves, and indirectly in the industries supplying the materials for these public works,” because “no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources.” Twenty years later, amid postwar peace and prosperity, Eisenhower urged that “a modern, efficient highway system is essential to meet the needs of our growing population, our expanding economy, and our national security.”
In this, as in all things, history rhymes: where Franklin Roosevelt promised in a fireside chat that Americans would “see the dirt fly,” Barack Obama, prior to his inauguration, promised Americans”shovel-ready projects all across the country.” But even beyond rhetorical echoes, infrastructure is and always has been seen as both a key to national prosperity and a font of national woe. It will “strengthen and perpetuate” the Union; it will bring us the pork barrel and “bridges to nowhere.” It will make us rich; it will cost us a fortune. It is the path to progress; it will ruin the environment.