… Do we have a government capable of building? The answer, too often, is no. What we have is a government that is extremely good at making building difficult. …
It costs about $538 million to build a kilometer of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $287 million. Canada gets it done for $254 million. Japan clocks in at $170 million. Spain is the cheapest country in the database, at $80 million.
The NYT’s choice of a silhouette photo of old-time construction workers actually getting big things built reminds me that if they’d shown a more revealing photo of a great construction site of liberalism, such as the Golden Gate Bridge or the Grand Coulee Dam, that it would be striking in 2022 just how deplorably white male the work force was back in the Bad (Yet, Inexplicably, Efficacious) Old Days.
Maybe one step in actually getting things built again is for liberalism to cut way back on expensive race and gender preferences?
But, in contrast to environmental delays, the entire topic of race/gender affirmative action is largely unspeakable for the Establishment today (Klein’s long article includes one vague reference to “picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement”) because merely mentioning affirmative action could remind the public that it exists, which is bad for The Narrative that America is systemically racist/sexist as proved by FDR’s redlining, Emmett Till, and no doubt lots of other events of more recent generations, although few specific examples come to mind offhand, but we know they must exist because the Theory of Intersectionality, which no one must ever doubt, says so.
