Progress Now Action

So now we have massive infrastructure failure at both ends of the Mississippi River. I guess this is the moment when the conservative goal of dragging off the government and drowning it has been most successful. The trouble is that both this tragedy and Hurricane Katrina demonstrate that government is not "them"- it is "us." And we are the ones being literally drowned. And before we are all overwhelmed by red herring press discussions of gussets versus welded construction on bridges, let's remember this -road and bridge maintenance is about funding, and we all know where the funds are going.

Bush stood up in a news conference and spoke relaxedly about the sub-prime mortgage disaster rippling through world markets. He said that the market would correct naturally and that we should all be happy that the economy is in such good shape, and that tax-and-spend Democrats would raise our taxes, undermine the entrepreneurial spirit and alter the spending habits of Americans who know better how to spend their money than does the government.

But infrastructure is not created by entrepreneurs and private investors. Infrastructure is more than simply a large capital investment like a telephone company or an electrical generator. Infrastructure generates social benefits that are beyond the financial returns to an investor. And infrastructure has what economists call "positive network effects." In other words, the more of it there is, the more valuable it becomes. An entrepreneur can build a toll road between two or three points, but unless it connects to all the other roads, it is of minimal value ("Bridge to Nowhere"). No entrepreneur would build the interstate highway system. And none would maintain it.

Government is the institution that societies create to handle things that we must do in common, and that will not be done well or at all by individuals acting in their own self-interest, no matter how enlightened. And there are a lot of those.