Constant Conservative

Ms. Shlaes, who after writing The Forgotten Man, knows a thing or two about public funding, has this to say regarding Japan’s experiment with building/spending its way out of a recession:

What lessons should the United States take away? It is wrong to assume that construction will guarantee a two-fer for the economy — shining structures and redemptive growth. The private sector is often better than politicians at guessing what the market needs. And infrastructure projects demand so much political energy that there’s too little energy left over for everything else. Congress might want to remember all this as it debates infrastructure funding in the coming months. An edifice complex seems more likely to petrify a country than to move it forward.

I think that she might have held back a bit. For instance, she said that “The private sector is often better than politicians at guessing what the market needs.” Might I got so far as to suggest that the private sector should be the only ones permitted to guess what the market needs? That is, while politicians may wonder, they should not make the the guesses. Is it too much to ask that politicians (particularly at the federal level) focus on driving the ship of state and leave the rest of the boats in the convoy to us?

However, do not let my somewhat picky point about Ms. Shlaes statement overshadow the benefit which she brings to the discussion, which I believe may be stated thus: we need to consider the lessons of history (both ancient, in the 1930s) as well as modern (in the 1990s in Japan) before we foolishly proceed to repeat them at exorbitant cost, both political and fiscal.

To close, here are some more thoughts on the topic from Jay Reding:

There’s also the fact that if you believe that government is more efficient at allocating goods and services than the private sector, you probably missed the whole “collapse of the Soviet Union” thing. Who will decide what “infrastructure” gets built where? A bunch of Washington nomenklatura? That creates a system where superhighways get built in places where politically powerful Congresscritters live while real needs go unmet. Government is simply not designed to do what Obama wants it to do, and as much hyperbole is there is about Obama being a “socialist” in this case his policies are the sort of thing we’d see from the leader of some banana republic. Economic troubles? Just round up some plebs and have them start digging ditches.