Posted on 03/16/2018 1:02:00 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
MASON CITY: To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.
Robert Penn Warren, All the Kings Men (1946)
WASHINGTON Appropriately, Warren began the best book about American populism, his novel based on Huey Longs Louisiana career, with a rolling sentence about a road. Time was, infrastructure roads, especially was a preoccupation of populists, who were mostly rural and needed roads to get products to market, and for travel to neighbors and towns, which assuaged loneliness. Today, there is no comparably sympathetic constituency clamoring for internal improvements, as infrastructure was known in the 19th century when canals, and then railroads, transformed America.
What rural electrification was eight decades ago, broadband access might be today: a blessing not widely enough enjoyed. But infrastructure spending will not have the economically and socially transformative effect that it had before America became a mature urban society. Princeton historian James M. McPherson writes that before all-weather macadamized roads, it cost the same to move a ton of goods 30 miles inland as it cost to bring a ton across the Atlantic. The person who would become the 16th president began his public career advocating canal construction in Illinois, and in 1849, before he became a prosperous railroad lawyer, he received U.S. patent 6469 for a device to facilitate boats passages over sand bars and shallow water.
Some historians even suggest that there might not have been a Civil War for him to win if the fourth president, James Madison, had not vetoed (on constitutional grounds; he thought that no enumerated power authorized Congress to do such things) the infrastructure bill of South Carolinas Sen. John C. Calhoun, who became a secessionist firebrand. . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Where there is a Will...there is no way I keep reading
You can say that again! They are in love with 1840s tech - trains. We are WASTING $100 billion on one that nobody wants or will use. It will likely be California's Stonehenge. All because of Democrat misplaced priorities. Clean water? Safe dams? Smooth roads? Cover up graffiti? Bah! "Let's build a train"
F G. Will
LOL!
Hasn’t he assumed room temperature yet?
That bridge seems to have been way over-engineered. I know of two pedestrian crossovers (one at a college) and they are not nearly that elaborate.
Reminds me of when one of my daughters wanted to take a train with friends to Southern California. This was just after she graduated from high school. They thought it would be so glamorous and exciting. They came back after a couple weeks or so, non-stop complaining about the trains and how they sucked! Too slow, noisy, uncomfortable, too much shaking, having to hook up to other transportation away from the station, etc. After that, it was hard to pry her away from driving her car everywhere in the state. Car gets her point-to-point, on her schedule.
Between San Francisco and Los Angeles, you either fly or drive. Period. Trains suck. Not knocking Caltrain, it's okay for short hops on the peninsula. But even that has problems as compared to driving a car. Highly subsidized by taxpayers, millions are being spent to electrify the trains in the name of zero-pollution. Except the old hybrid electric/diesel locomotives are already electric, as the diesel engines create electricity for the electric motors. The newer trains will use overhead wires to transport electricity from afar with loss due to resistance, and that electricity will be created from fossil-fuel sources. All these train changes are a waste of taxpayer money.
George ain’t gonna do near as much over his career to help America as trump does each and every day....’nuff sed.
I have an infrastructure suggestion:
Dig a hole and stuff in George Will.
Whiny little cherrypicker ping. Thanks Tolerance Sucks Rocks.
Can’t stand George Will either (anymore) but the book he quotes sounds worth the read: Robert Penn Warren, All the Kings Men...
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