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Appropriately, [Robert Penn] Warren began the best book about American populism, his novel based on Huey Long’s 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 . . .. . . Today, the nation needs somewhat increased infrastructure spending to increase productivity by reducing road and port congestions and boosting the velocity of economic activity. Unfortunately, this subject is not immune to the rhetorical extravagance that infects all of today’s political discourse . . .. . . The last surge of infrastructure spending, in the Obama administration’s stimulus, taught a useful lesson: Because of the ever-thickening soup of regulations, there are no “shovel-ready†projects. So, such spending cannot be nimble enough to ameliorate business cycles. This is just as well: Government attempts to fine-tune the economy are folly. America got many marvels — e.g., the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge — from New Deal infrastructure spending. It did not get what the spending was supposed to provide: a cure for unemployment, which never fell below 14 percent until the nation prepared for World War II . . .
