China 1, America 0

January 29, 2022

This is an extra newsletter I’ve written, before the onset of another news-packed week of Russian threats and Beijing’s Olympics on February 4. I was just minding my business in New York City recently when I came across this photo online:

This is another new, spiffy high-speed rail system being custom-made for China’s 2022 Games. By contrast, here’s a scene familiar to those of us who also love and live, full or part-time, in New York City:

New York subway 2018. Still not much better.

The juxtaposition is interesting as America and China duke it out for economic supremacy and bragging rights as the world’s greatest governance/economic model. America is about free enterprise, individual liberty, and innovation. China is about discipline and state control. America wins as best in class hands-down in terms of human rights, income per capita, and freedom. But imagine if the Olympics were staged in America’s wealthiest metropolis, New York? Everyone attending — from tourists to athletes to officials — would get to Olympic venues via clogged roads with potholes, dilapidated bridges, or on a subway system that looks like it belongs in Zimbabwe or Calcutta.

Obviously, trophy infrastructure is always built around an Olympics because they are mostly public relations exercises, but America’s infrastructure deficit has been around forever and points out an embedded cultural flaw: the country was formed by people who threw the tea in the harbor to avoid taxes and they’ve been dodging them ever since. Americans resent both government and taxes and vote for politicians who promise to cut them and cut spending. The result is the infrastructure is only built by contractors who are the lowest tender bidders. Worse, the stuff isn’t maintained or regulated by America’s stingy, cash-starved governments — with predictable consequences like this one in Miami in 2019 that killed a few people:

This is not a failure of democracy. Canada, Australia, Europe, and other rich nations build world-class infrastructure and keep it in top working condition. America is an outlier and most Americans know this. A 2021 survey finds only 27 percent of American adults say they are satisfied with their country’s infrastructure, compared with an average of 39 percent across the 28 countries surveyed and 37 percent across all G8 countries:

Last year, President Joe Biden miraculously stick-handled The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act through Congress. Then this week, ironically, just hours before he arrived in Pittsburgh to deliver an address about the importance of replacing the country’s crumbling infrastructure, a local bridge collapsed, nearly killing several people.

The Act is an achievement but will undoubtedly become mired in America’s political swamp for years. That is because the failure to admit problems, to tax in order to address them, and political squabbling that follows gives new meaning to the phrase “tragedy of the commons”.

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