Can America build big infrastructure projects anymore?
The 20th century's principal infrastructure involved pouring an ocean of concrete. Greenspan and Wooldridge: "All America's hard-surfaced roads in 1900, laid end to end, would not have stretched from New York to Boston, or 215 miles." In 1986, workers completed I-80, the first transcontinental interstate, from New York's George Washington Bridge to the Bay Bridge. Last month was the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's speech summoning the nation to send astronauts to the moon in the 1960s. Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist, says of the speech: "It seems like it comes not just from a different time but from a different country." Kennedy's challenge required accomplishing 2 million tasks, a million of which involved then-uninvented technologies. He did not stoke racial or class divisions; he spoke of a national identity receptive to great and uncertain exertions. He did not pander to particular constituencies, promising union jobs and racial "equity" throughout the space program. Instead, he asked the nation to take gigantic risks for the nation's, and humanity's, benefit.