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Samizdata other quote of the day Though in other ways, we’re clearly in a new dark age. The fact that New York City is unable to conceive of building new bridges or subways or other infrastructure, and on the rare occasions when it tries to do so fails utterly, should tell us that. It’s like being a Roman in 500 AD and wondering at the giants of the past who built bridges and aqueducts, by then long lost technologies. I feel like I’m not just at the epicenter of capitalism here in Manhattan, but also at the epicenter of the cancer at the heart of it, to wit, the socialist destruction of the human will.
– Perry Metzger, in a private discussion
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the socialist destruction of the human will
I nominate this for Samizdata Truth of the Year.
This is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
yup
Good one.
That’s a good articulation of what I’ve been noticing for the last few years. Here in California we’re building a new train that operates on its own Moore’s financial law, where the price doubles every 18 months. It goes from nowhere to nowhere and will likely never be finished without a huge cash infusion from the rest of the country. It’s not a one-off, either – bridges, highways, dams… we can’t build them any more for a price that makes them worth building.
I wouldn’t say we can’t do these things — when the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis fell into the Mississippi, there was a newer, better bridge up less than a year later.
The problem, rather, is the army of the useless making sure nothing happens. They can’t do much of anything, and they’re making damn sure none of the rest of us do better.
The problem is not a destruction of the will, so much as empowerment of the won’t.
Here in Australia, things are also bad. My father used to say, when he worked for Qantas, that the planes never left the ground until the paperwork equalled the weight of the plane. I don’t imagine things have improved since then.
Let me join with QET in his nomination for STotY. A perfectly brilliant observation and summary. Congrats to Perry M.
Eric,
How close to bankruptcy is the state of California? I’ve heard that forecast a few times in different places…
I’ve got John Galt’s motor in my basement if anyone’s interested.
Eric,
You wrote: “… Moore’s financial law, where the price doubles every 18 months.”
I nominate this for Samizdata Quote of the Day.
Are you going to give John Galt’s motor to the public for nothing, and be known as a great public benefactor? How did it end up in your basement? Is Galt dead?
“How close to bankruptcy is the state of California?”
Closer now than it was when Obama was running the feds, but, between their pension deficit, infrastructure emergency, energy shortfalls and cost of government, they’re going to get a major infusion of federal dollars soon that’ll buy them ten more years.
They’ll never go bankrupt. Officially, I mean. Too many national donors to both sides out there, mostly for this reason.
Incredibly well put.
In all sorts of activities, from engineering projects to universities, the middling calibre hired help has been an empire-building, rent-seeking army of lower calibre hired hindrance, ever ready to come up with the same, unworkable, bad ideas in the expectation that something that has failed once, or perhaps twice, will succeed now ‘because this time it’s different’…
The empowerment of the won’t Ellen speaks about contributes directly to the destruction of the will. People who would be otherwise building and producing useful things just can’t be bothered anymore. And when some of them still build and produce those things, they are told ‘You didn’t build that’.
James Hargreave,
Not sure I’d list the universities alongside government engineering projects, at least in the UK – they are competing, and they are increasingly making decisions on a sensible commercial basis. There is still a lot of stupid ideologies around, even at VC level, but you’d have to look hard for a proper hard-left VC being appointed to a successful university… Universities might not be the best example of how to run things available, and some might be basket cases, but the same applies to any large business – and they are far better than government.
Oh, and ignore the student idiots (most of the other students do for a start) – they have no real influence.
Overall, I put the failure to effectively build down to a failure of optimism. The reason we do not do these things is that we (or at least those in control, and those that they persuade to vote them in) do not trust others to make money through providing a service, or to not exploit workers, or to not build white elephants without ‘proper’ planning. Socialism, US-style ‘liberalism’ and their ilk (including most likely the Trump and May styles of conservatism) are negative in outlook and defensive, and cannot allow others to have success without suspicion and jealousy.
Note the Chinese, who have a fairly unpositive government, do get things built because they tend to believe it is possible. They do not create their own impediments. Wheras the Indians, who until recently have been notable for the total lack of optimism in their politics, seem to have the view that things won’t happen, and they rarely do…
The state passes through various stages.
At first “infrastructure” (even in Ancient Rome) is a private matter -and one gets such things as the privately owned canals and turnpike trust roads of England and Wales (Scotland and Ireland were different) – then the state takes over but is still relatively efficient.
In the case of New York – the City had a small government in the 1920s, a big but efficient government in the 1930s and early 1940s, and a big and horribly inefficient government since the 1950s (Mayor Wagner and unionisation).
In the case of New York State the end of the time of Governor Dewey in 1956 (and the defeat of his chosen successor by the smallest margin in New York State election history – Harriaman and the Democrats may well have rigged the vote) marks the end of big, but relatively efficient, government in the New York – and the rise of unionisation and endless bureaucracy and rules that mean it takes many years (and vast amounts of money) to even START a project.
At the Federal level the move from small to big government occurred NOT under Franklin Roosevelt but under Herbert “The Forgotten Progressive” Hoover (who started most of the Big Government schemes that “FDR” renamed and expanded), and the move from Big but relatively efficient government to the current dysfunctional mess really occurred after January 20th 1961 – yes “Saint” Jack Kennedy really created the present unionised and endlessly bureaucratic Federal government.
It should be noted that the Red Tape of the government does not just harm Civil Society – it harms government itself (the expense remains the same, indeed GROWS, but nothing gets-done). The government tries to be “all in all” – and ends in “impotent imbecility”.
As with Ancient Rome the taxes and regulations continue to undermine Civil Society – indeed they are vastly worse than ever, but nothing seems to get done….. even the military falls apart.
With the Roman Empire taxes and spending really start to get out of control with the Emperor S. Severus, but it is not till the Emperor Diocletian (by the way it is a lie that he restored order after the “crises of the third century” – Aurelian and Probus had already done that) that the Roman Empire starts to become alien – a place of Asiatic Despotism.
It gets even more extreme with Constantine (look at his statues – clearly a megalomaniac) – who ended up concentrating the main army around him (in the capital of Constantinople – far from the threatened borders) and trying to run everything from the centre.
“But now we have fast travel (not marching men and horses) and instant communications – we can do what Constantine could not”.
No you can not – no more than socialism is made possible by having super computers for economic planning.
The United States?
President Trump will be blamed for the breakdown of the Federal Reserve Credit Bubble economy – the one economic virtue of Constantine is that he had a proper coinage and did not go for Credit Bubble finance.
In 2021 a new President will inherit a collapsed economy which the left (the education system and so on) will blame on “capitalism”.
The new Administration will try and establish socialism after 2021 – perhaps under the name of “economic democracy”, socialism will fail (and fail utterly). And so that will be the end of the United States of America.
Could it be that these infrastructure projects aren’t needed or valued anywhere near as highly now we have lots already? property rights, health and safety etc all add up to more important for society than anyone pone big infrastructure thing. Revealed preference and all that. Society is always a balance of competing interests. The balance being dynamic.
There may be a specific problem with underground railways. In London in 1900 underground railways made money and there was a rush to build new ones. By the time they were built in 1910 the internal combustion engine had matured and buses were cleaning their clocks. To survive the underground railways had to club together and then buy up the buses. In other words the unprofitable bit bought up the profitable bit. Weird but true.
So, it is possible that underground railways have made no economic sense for over a century. Hey, even the Tokyo – you know the biggest city in the world where all the other railways are private – undergrounds (yes, plural) are still government-owned and always have been.
Patrick rightly highlights the (literally) sunken cost issue of the failure monopoly, and indeed the entire rail transport concept has the overtaking problem that roads mitigate and aviation eliminates. Indeed, in the 1920s some reportedly thought that the personal aircraft, like the English Electric Wren might supplant the motor vehicle as the personal transport of the future. It was not to be, but what a world this might have been.
“To survive the underground railways had to club together and then buy up the buses.”
How quaint. Over here, they just buy whatever politicians it takes to regulate their upstart competitor out of existence.
Patrick Crozier.
I suggest you look at the financial performance of the Metropolitan District and the City and South London and set those against the Central London. And also consider the heavy capital investment required to build a shallow underground or deep tube in London. A much more complicated picture really, involving electric trams and, in response to them, electrification of suburban above-ground railways. And those running the London General Omnibus Co. were much keener on horses than petrol.
I think that this is a major aim of the environmental left – to deindustrialize society and move back to a simpler way of life. They are accomplishing it by standing in the way of new infrastructure, making projects too expensive, time-consuming, or stupid (trains) to even consider, and stopping almost completed projects just before they start up (see, e.g, the oil pipeline in ND, and a bunch of nuclear power plants).
They are also trying to destroy the knowledge base to build those projects, by dumbing down STEM education (making it “relevant” to people who don’t understand the material in its current format) and reducing the technical competence of the general public (“You don’t really need to learn math”), and this is already showing results. The French, who don’t normally succumb to this crap, even though they invented it, can’t build nuclear plants any more, and in the US all the old guys who built the existing plants are retired, so any new ones have to re-learn the lessons of the past.
The eco-left wants to go back to a society where we all sit around a (small) fire, weaving blankets by hand, singing songs, and saying nice things to one another. It is their vision of the “good-old days”.
I assure you the eco-left only want that for the few who survive the mass die-off they would quite like to see.