Progressively Worse
24th May 2021
Activist government’s dysfunction is not only a pervasive problem, but a worsening one. Things used to work better. It took “two decades, with huge cost overruns,” Walters observes, “to replace one-third of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge [after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake], even though building the entire bridge originally took just four years in the 1930s.” Similarly, economists Leah Brooks and Zachary Liscow found that, even after adjusting for inflation, the cost to build one mile of interstate highway tripled between the 1960s and the 1980s.
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Progressives like to think of themselves as forward-looking—thinking about tomorrow, candidate Clinton said in 1992, by way of Fleetwood Mac. Or, as Clinton’s hero John F. Kennedy declared in 1960, the modern liberal “welcomes new ideas” because he is “someone who looks ahead and not behind.”
But yesterday is not gone, Kennedy, Clinton, and Fleetwood Mac to the contrary notwithstanding. William Faulkner was closer to the truth when he said that the past isn’t even past. Its continuing, pervasive effects frustrate progressives’ desire to confine retrospection to criticizing our ancestors’ misdeeds or surpassing their achievements.