[KarlInOhio]

He might have an arguement that infrastructure was vital if the government was spending it on something productive. Imagine something like gigabit per second networks to every business and house in the country as a 21st century analog of the interstate highways. Instead, they pissed away tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in "stimulus" money on things like curb cuts and sidewalks.

[virgil]

I agree that you need railways, roads, airports, other things for a modern industrialized country. Not so sure we needed a massive, bloated federal govt involved to get all of those things, though. But then, what would the federal govt do without industry? There’d be no work for them, nothing to regulate, except...you and me. Maybe the NSA spying..the IRS harassment...the militarization of police, obamacare, etc are attempts at govt to use whatever means possible, some of them draconian, to justify their existence as industry deflates. This assumes that our economy is shrinking though and I don’t know if it really is. If true, though, as industry-business deflates, will govt get bigger and bigger, and totalitarian? Nature abhors a vacuum.