Obama’s transportation infrastructure plans presume to make choices for local citizens and private businesses, ignoring input from everyday users of the transportation system.
Read Obama’s Transportation Infrastructure Plan Wastes $50 Billion,
October 9, 2010
, by Gabriel Roth on the Independent Institute website.
Quote:
President Obama’s recent announcement of a $50 billion “up-front investment” for “renewing and expanding our transportation infrastructure” raises the obvious question: Why should government officials determine the amounts to be spent on roads, railroads, airport runways and air traffic control?
...As existing banks are capable of investing on that basis, one has to assume that the purpose of the infrastructure bank is to fund politically inspired investments that can’t meet conventional banking standards.
Thus, it appears that the items in the president’s list of infrastructure improvements are unspecified, unnecessary or downright wasteful.
When provided by governments, transportation improvements have to compete for funds against other political priorities.
On the other hand, under a market system, consumers themselves determine priorities by their willingness to pay for them. For example, many road users might prefer to spend less on vehicles and more on roads.
It’s a story as old as the beginning of formalized socialism after the French Revolution. Engineers were heavily represented among Saint-Simonians, the early 19th century school that founded modern socialism.
They and their leader Henri de Saint-Simon were convinced that the rapid advances of science had enabled men to master nature, bringing history into a new age in which political and social affairs would be scientifically restructured by an elite composed of academic theorists and bureaucratic administrators.
From this came the concepts of social engineering and state planning. Underlying them is intellectuals’ smug certainty that most people are too stupid to understand what is in their best interests. Obamacare and the president’s expectation that his subjects will learn to love Big Brother and his works are products of that mindset.
Liberal-progressivism is the present-day ideological home of the Saint-Simonian paradigm. Free-market supply and demand is to be ignored, because the liberal-progressive intelligencia, far above us in their ivory tower, presume to determine in an intellectual vacuum the ideal allocation of scarce economic resources.
Citizens expressing their preferences in a free-market economy are the only ones able to determine the most effective and economic allocation of public funds. Unvarying experience demonstrates that state planners do an abominable job of determining what projects are to be undertaken, their cost, and where to execute them. Example number one is the Soviet Union. Our examples range from the billions of dollars expended by the ever-growing Federal Energy Department, with no useful results after almost half a century, to Boston’s Big Dig.
President Obama’s transportation-control initiative is heavily slanted toward the pagan religion of mother-earth, one-world-government environmentalism. Most people don’t want, and the nation doesn’t need, more green jobs, more expensive energy, and fewer people employed in non-unionized private business. But if Democrat/Socialists succeed in their grand design, we will have these results and little else.
In the perception of President Obama and and his advisors Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, and of Democrat/Socialist Party leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, only Soviet-style state planners are capable of making politically and socially correct choices. The rest of us will just have to learn to like it or lump it.
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