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VIEWPOINTS, Aug. 9, 2009: U.S. infrastructure: A Canal to Bank On? by Gerard Koeppel. Date published: 8/9/2009
NEW YORK --Barack Obama, Christopher Dodd, and Felix Rohatyn, among many other people, have proposed the creation of a national infrastructure bank as a mechanism for building and rebuilding American bridges, highways, tunnels, railroads, and other major works. The president in his budget, the senator in a pending bill, and the financier in a recently published book all invoke the iconic Erie Canal: It was the first great thing we built and the sort of thing we need to start doing again.Two hundred Januaries ago President Jefferson called New York's proposal to lay a slender waterway across its upstate wilderness "madness," but against long odds the 363-mile canal was completed 16 years later (after nine construction seasons), joining the eastern seaboard to the unsettled interior and helping make possible our sea-to-shining-sea continental nation. The Erie Canal is praised now by the infrastructure chorus, but is the legendary canal relevant? Certainly there is no relevance in financial terms. The mission of President Obama's infrastructure bank "will be to not only provide direct federal investment but also to help foster coordination through state, municipal, and private co-investment in our nation's most challenging infrastructure needs." On his last day in office in 1817, President Madison stunningly vetoed an innovative bill that would have provided federal money to start New York's great canal and lesser projects in other states. Madison, who had built the Constitution with strictly limited federal power as a protection against tyranny, decided that the Treasury had no power to fund such things as roads and canals. New York, complaining bitterly that Madison really had no interest in supporting state projects that might harm the interests of his own Virginia, went ahead on its own with risky but ultimately secure state-issued bonds. The Erie certainly can't be a model for infrastructure projects in the 21st century. It was dug, blasted, and mucked out through mostly unbroken territory. It was designed by country surveyors impersonating trained engineers. It was contracted in small sections by unprosperous pioneer farmers. It was built with crude tools by farmhands and gangs of Irish immigrant laborers, of whom thousands were horribly disabled by sickness and injury. Death on the job was misfortune, not a cause of action.
Date published: 8/9/2009
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