[leodler]

Somehow we (the United States) accomplished generational projects that are currently out of the realm of possibility such as the interstate system without risking anything like a famine. I think a lot of people in America have been overly-empowered to stand in the way of the most modest progress through NIMBYism, litigation, local government, etc. To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.

[Arainach]

"Somehow" we did that back when we believed in a strong federal government working for the benefit of the people. It's no wonder that we lost the ability after decades of anti-government propaganda and regulatory capture.

[somenameforme]

It's not that people turned against the government just randomly. Who was the last genuinely socially motivated President we had? I idealize JFK, but I think that's largely because of his charisma, how he ended, and obviously the space program. Yet how did he not just immediately condemn and completely dismantle the entire CIA when the proposal for Operation Northwoods [1] reached his desk, and was one signature away from execution? And that'll probably look benign as the actions from more recent decades are declassified in the future.

And after his assassination everything went downhill fast with divide and conquer, all alongside global self destructive geopolitical nonsense that continues to this very day. We have spent, just since 2000 upwards of a very conservative baseline of $10 trillion on war and military related expenses. That's a starting point of about $30,000 for every single man, woman, and child in America. Think about all of the amazing things we could have done with that money. Instead we just blew it on pointless wars and have literally less than nothing to show for it since they not only made the US far less safe, but made the world far less stable.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

[yonaguska]

I don't believe we are capable of a strong government that will also work for the benefit of the people today. Anti government sentiment didn't just spring up from a vacuum.

[brabel]

There’s a good argument for America having been able to do all it did despite being a democracy without a strong central government, not because of it. Look around the world and see how many countries managed to achieve similar success using the same liberal principles? Most of Europe became rich under imperialist, authoritarian governments not with their current system. I would love to see a good counter argument that’s convincing since I find this realization extremely sad as for all my life I believed the propaganda about democracy and liberalism being the route to success just to see most countries that tried to emulate that fail miserably.

[chii]

> To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.

that is what it means to have property rights.

It prevents your interests from being usurped by someone else without first consulting you. Of course, like anything, it can be taken too far, but getting the balance right is important.

If it tips too far towards gov't authoritarianism, the people who are not connected tends to suffer silently (while the majority who gets told these "nation building" projects benefits them).

If it tips too far towards the private individual, then you get nimby-ism and such.

[ryandrake]

America's elevation of individuality and property rights above everything else, its inability to work together collectively to achieve a goal, and its citizen's infighting, distrust of and belligerence toward each other, are the main reasons it is incapable of doing big things anymore.

The minute we had a huge health emergency that should have united the population, it was immediately politicized such that half the country was trying to fix it, and the other half were trying to prolong it and grief the fixers.

We're done for if we can't stop pitting half the country against each other over literally every issue.

[BrenBarn]

More and more I think the mistake is seeing it as a tradeoff between "property rights" and "government authoritarianism". First, because authoritarianism is not much better when it happens to be non-government authoritarianism (i.e., when corporations become more powerful than government). And second, because it treats "property rights" as a single fixed notion, rather than recognizing that we can have property rights that are not independent of the amount of property owned. Just because "property rights" means that Paul the Peon has absolute dominion over his hovel, there's no particular reason it also has to mean that Oliver the Oligarch has absolute dominion over his dozens of mansions, factories, private security forces, etc. We can have a system where your rights over property decrease the more of it you have, so that in the limit there is effectively a maximum on how much property can be owned or controlled by a single individual (and therefore by a group of individuals).

[tshaddox]

Presumably many of the people who currently attribute China’s ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism would also attribute America’s past ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism. They would presumably also decry any future attempts to build ambitious infrastructure in America as authoritarianism.

[Jackpillar]

Yeah lets talk about them tax rates at the time of these accomplished generational projects (comment is in support of them)

[EGreg]

Actually, the US didn’t have a famine, it had the opposite. Automation like combines and tractors obviated the need for oxen and farmhands to plow and reap manually. The farmers competed in a race to the bottom (depleting the soil and causing the dust bowl). They fired most farmhands and still had a surplus. Food prices plummeted while giant dust storms became the norm.

The government had to step in and pay farmers NOT to plant, to extricate them from the downward spiral / race to the bottom that the “free market” had producted in the face of automation / massive supply shocks.

Meanwhile, the laid-off farm workers (20% of USA used to be employed in farm-related jobs) migrated to cities but it would be a decade before the manufacturing base was built up to employ them. They lived in Hoovervilles and shantytowns set up to house them. A third of the country’s banks failed and the money supply shrank. The fed sat that one out. You can read books by John Steinbeck and others describing life at that time (eg Grapes of Wrath).

So eventually, projects like the Interstate Highway System, and even weapons manufacturing and mobilization for WW2 caused mass employment. At a time when people needed jobs, this was a good thing for the economy and didn’t need communist propaganda to attract workers. Capitalism’s race to the bottom created the desperation the workers needed for undertake large state projects. And it is about to happen again.

Ironically, around the same time the US had a massive surplus, Russia and China were experiencing massive man-made famines under collectivization. Whether that horrific economic experiment ultimately led to more prosperity through 5-year plans is a contentious question (ideological leftists like Noam Chomsky have told me, quoting Amartya Sen, that supposedly China had less deaths from malnutrition afterwards than India, but that’s hardly a high bar considering their population density).

PS: I don’t mean to pick on communism alone for extreme ideological economic system enforcement leading to famines. The Irish Potato Famine could probably be squarely put into the ideological capitalism column (landlords and property rights trumping people’s lives), or how Britain (a capitalist country) exploited India and the famines in Bengal were also largely due to requisition of grain, similar to the Volga famine during the Russian civil war.

[omikun]

The interstate was for the military. The new deal was in part thanks to left wing communists/unionists voicing for the gov to do more for the people. Then came McCarthyism.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

I'm a yimby but to be fair the welfare system is so broken in the US that it's kind of a de facto ongoing famine