> our old infrastructure is awesome we just haven't been investing in it for the last 30 years due to the small government conservitard meme
I agree with the majority of your comment, but the reality of this part is actually considerably more complicated. I used to think the same way, but it turns out that we are incredibly horribly bad at efficiently doing infrastructure projects, with costs/mi tending to be some multiple of similar projects in other developed countries. This holds even when controlling for all sorts of things; my understanding is that economists in the relevant field aren't really 100% sure what the cause is.
From this perspective, the small govt argument becomes a lot more grounded in real complaints about govt's incompetency at this task, on top of their baseline ideological complaint about government not being an appropriate way to allocate capital in the first place.
FWIW, I'm pretty irritated at the horrendous inefficiency of American infrastructure projects but also think that they often are economically worthwhile despite it. But it's unfair to cast this complaint as a thoughtless "conservitard meme" in the case of infrastructure, given that the complaints are to some degree grounded in reality.
I agree with the majority of your comment, but the reality of this part is actually considerably more complicated. I used to think the same way, but it turns out that we are incredibly horribly bad at efficiently doing infrastructure projects, with costs/mi tending to be some multiple of similar projects in other developed countries. This holds even when controlling for all sorts of things; my understanding is that economists in the relevant field aren't really 100% sure what the cause is.
From this perspective, the small govt argument becomes a lot more grounded in real complaints about govt's incompetency at this task, on top of their baseline ideological complaint about government not being an appropriate way to allocate capital in the first place.
FWIW, I'm pretty irritated at the horrendous inefficiency of American infrastructure projects but also think that they often are economically worthwhile despite it. But it's unfair to cast this complaint as a thoughtless "conservitard meme" in the case of infrastructure, given that the complaints are to some degree grounded in reality.