The Infrastructure Delusion
Richard W. Fulmer
The FreeMan: ideas on liberty, August 15, 2011
Red tape to nowhere
Infrastructure does not an economy make. Highways and railroads, airports and seaports, communications towers and fiber optics cables are essential for the flow of commerce, but it is the people, goods, and information moving over and through this infrastructure that are the heart of an economy. Overinvestment in roads, bridges, and airports means underinvestment in the productive base that is an economy's life blood.Government spending means more than just an outlay of dollars; it means consuming scarce resources that cannot then be used for other things. Such spending does not increase production, it simply shifts resources into areas where they would not otherwise have gone.
As described in William J. Bernstein's book The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created , France's minister of finances under Louis XIV from 1665 to 1683, Jean-Baptiste Colbert , worked tirelessly to expand commerce by improving his country's roads and canals. Unfortunately, trade was hindered by more than potholes — a complex system of internal tariffs was throttling commerce. Colbert tried to dismantle the tariffs but was only partially successful. After his death, “all fiscal restraint was lost. By the end of Louis XIV's reign three decades later, the State had doubled the tolls on the roads and rivers it controlled, and the nation that had once been Europe's breadbasket … was bled white….” Bad regulations trumped good roads.
Prometheus Bound (in Red Tape)
During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt initiated massive public-works programs to improve the nation's infrastructure in hopes of putting people back to work and jumpstarting the economy. The construction efforts were staggering. According to Conrad Black :
The government hired about 60 percent of the unemployed in public-works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York City's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the heroic aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown. They also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields.
Yet these extraordinary accomplishments were not enough to pull the nation out of the Depression. Neither were the millions of jobs generated by this monumental work.
Not only did the work direct resources away from the private sector but, worse, Roosevelt unleashed a regulatory blizzard on the nation's private sector, significantly increasing the risk of doing business in the country. Higher personal, corporate, excise, and estate taxes; wage and price controls; production restrictions; antitrust lawsuits; and constant experimentation provided few incentives for companies to expand. As in Louis XIV's France, an improved infrastructure could not revive commerce in the face of stifling government regulations.
High-Speed Rail to Nowhere
Today, Barack Obama is touting high-speed rail and other infrastructure improvements as keys to economic renewal. But if massive infrastructure investments were not enough to turn the economy around in the 1930s, they are far less likely to do so today. Because Roosevelt was starting from a lower base, his improvements would have had a far greater impact on the economy of his day than would similar work done now. Furthermore, the lighter regulatory burden in the 1930s meant that there were projects then that truly were “shovel ready.” Today, environmental impact studies, possible archeological finds, and nuisance lawsuits may stall construction for years or halt it completely.
The real roadblock to economic growth is the burgeoning regulatory burden that President Obama, like Roosevelt before him, has placed on business. According to a study by James Gattuso and Diane Katz, “[T]he Obama Administration imposed 75 new major regulations from January 2009 to mid-FY 2011, with annual costs of $38 billion.” Hundreds of additional regulations will pour forth from Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and proposed EPA greenhouse gas restrictions. All this is on top of an already monumental regulatory burden imposed by government. According to a Small Business Administration report (pdf), the cost of regulatory compliance was over $1.75 trillion in 2008 alone.
Goods, people, and information will not flow freely across a nation, regardless of the quality and extent of its infrastructure, if taxes and regulations block their flow. Trade perished in France as Colbert's improved roads and canals were made all but useless by high internal tariffs. Some 700,000 miles of new and rebuilt roads were not enough to move commerce past the regulatory roadblocks that Roosevelt erected. President Obama's proposed high-speed trains will not pull the country over the mountain of regulations that has been created in the decades since the Great Depression and that Obama has raised to new heights. A bridge wrapped in red tape is truly a bridge to nowhere.
Published by the Foundation for Economic Education.
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