Hi Ben. Thanks for the reply. You stated:
"... the Federal Government is very clearly defined in the US constitution. The only reason that the interstate highway system is under the control of the federal government is that it was deemed necessary for national defense. ... Outside of the fact that it isn't the Federal Government's role, why would anyone think that the government wouldn't screw it up even worse than it already is?"
Your response rings true to many, I'm sure. Although, I'm challenged to see why it was constitutionally correct to go forward with a national vehicular highway system under the heading of national defense, but it is now seen as constitutionally incorrect to set policies for the leveraging of national infrastructure. On the one hand you are assigning sufficient gravity to national defense to warrant a highway system that was built in an era when armored personnel carriers were regarded as potential threats to civilian security, but on the other hand you are suggesting that national defense can be regarded as separate and distinct from the underlying infrastructure that supports most of our essential utilities, including electricity, gas and other energy related pipelines, water supply, drainage and sewage systems, regional irrigation systems, all forms of electronic communications and mass transportation.
While I share some of your cynicism, probably to a greater degree than I usually let on here, concerning how government mismanages the execution of programs that are supposedly designed to benefit its citizens, we've got to start somewhere in assessing what makes sense and the efficiency of the ways in which infrastructure is viewed today. This means not only comparing opposing ideologies within national or regional borders, but how those ideologies compare around the world, as well. It's another tradeoff that all organizations -- and now individuals, as well -- must face when dealing with issues surrounding off-shoring and a myriad of other implications brought about by an ever-flattening world. If globalization has only one take-away for us, then it's the value it affords us as a yardstick to measure our own performance.
In my view, even the most under-developed regions of the world, along with countries that are millennia old and have been opposed to capitalism for centuries, have radically changed their ways in order to be more competitive with N.A. and Europe, merely following the script that this country attempted shoving down their throats throughout the cold war years. And now we find them winning one economic battle after the other, as we sit and type. A population can either modernize its ways of thinking to take into account new realities, however painful doing so might be, or continue sticking its collective head in the sand. What to do?
I grant you that nothing that can be instituted in policy today can affect short- or even intermediate- term conditions. But utilities undergo project life cycles that are never-ending in order to build infrastructures with life cycles that last many decades, if not a century. Last week, NY City Councilwoman Gale Brewer noted that NY and Boston were among the last remaining big cities that still were without a viable cityscale wireless agenda. She noted that Boston had the perfect opportunity to lay the backbone and site its antennas throughout much of the city during its recent Big Dig project, but failed to capitalize on it for unspoken reasons. Today, whoever wants to gain entry to the facilities that the dig's local authority is responsible for will have to negotiate and build access to it, anew. And one can rest assured that such will be the case _if_ the cost-benefit analysis of doing so today at very high unit costs -- versus the lower, marginal costs that would have applied during the original dig -- justifies it.
If officials in Washington are incompetent, or just too slothy while at the same time self-serving, in their execution of programs affecting public welfare, then fire the bastards at the ballot boxes, or bring them to the courts. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water while you're doing so.
FAC |
