Posted by Tina
The President has been in full campaign mode traveling across the country to speak about his fantastic economy and repeat the mantra that we can still do better. His big plan today is the same big plan of yesterday…and the day before that, and, well, since he started campaigning for the presidency a full year before the campaign season of 2008!
You see, he explains, we haven’t spent quite enough yet and if we just spend a bit more, on things like….infrastructure, the economy will really take off…really…it will…cross his heart!
President Obama’s plan feeds off an old progressive belief that infrastructure spending by our government saved the day in times gone by. But is that “history” entirely accurate?
Not according to Larry Schweikart in this Wall Street Journal article:
Henry Ford and dozens of other auto makers put a car in almost every garage decades before the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956. The success of the car created a demand for roads. The government didn’t build highways, and then Ford decided to create the Model T. Instead, the highways came as a byproduct of the entrepreneurial genius of Ford and others.
Moreover, the makers of autos, tires and headlights began building roads privately long before any state or the federal government got involved. The Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway for cars, pieced together from new and existing roads in 1913, was conceived and partly built by entrepreneurs—Henry Joy of Packard Motor Car Co., Frank Seiberling of Goodyear and Carl Fisher, a maker of headlights and founder of the Indy 500.
Railroads are another example of the infrastructure-follows-entrepreneurship rule. Before the 1860s, almost all railroads were privately financed and built. One exception was in Michigan, where the state tried to build two railroads but lost money doing so, and thus happily sold both to private owners in 1846. When the federal government decided to do infrastructure in the 1860s, and build the transcontinental railroads (or “intercontinental railroad,” as Mr. Obama called it in 2011), the laying of track followed the huge and successful private investments in railroads.
In fact, when the government built the transcontinentals, they were politically corrupt and often—especially in the case of the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific—went broke. One cause of the failure: Track was laid ahead of settlements. Mr. Obama wants to do something similar with high-speed rail….(continues)
As usual, progressives get the cart before the horse when it comes to government involvement. They also do their utmost to bury the failures that pile up following government intrusion into what is and should continue to be the private sector’s bailiwick.
I hope you will read the entire article, it contains information about plane, train, and automobile related infrastructure that you may never have heard before. You probably have never seen this information written in your child’s schoolbooks, more’s the pity! Our progressive schools wouldn’t want to inspire the entrepreneurial spirit in young people, they might never vote Democrat again!
It would make me so happy to see America become a vibrant and thriving force again with plenty of jobs and opportunity for all of our young people and for all of those of middle aged people who are supposed to be in their most productive years right now. Obama’s economy will be a long 8 lost years for many of our citizens. All we need is a government that will let America be American again! We would still face a lot of work cleaning up the expensive bureaucratic tangle that fifty or more years of progressive big government policies have brought to our nation…but we would be working and producing again…and we could once again save and invest in our own futures and dreams…we could imagine a future for our children once more.
Learning from history requires that we actually know history…in full color and scope! Keep reading America; we’ll get there yet!