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Friday, August 19, 2011

What Government is For

Last week I drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway outside of Asheville, North Carolina, as part of a family vacation. Even more than the parkways around New York City and Washington, DC, the Blue Ridge is a park-way. It's not an especially practical way to get from one place to another if you are in any sort of hurry because the roads winds around and through several mountains. The speed limit never exceeds 50 mph. The views are stunning, and hiking trailheads apeear evey couple of miles along the way.

As a feat of engineering, the road is remarkable. The energy, resources and ingenuity it must have taken to carve the road bed from the hills without doing irreparable damage (which, I'm sure is relative) are awe-inspiring. The road was built as part of the New Deal, with federal money.

As I drove along, I was both impressed an saddened as I thought about these facts. At one time in our nation's histort, we allowed our government to acheive things like this. It built bridges and dams and roads and hospitals. Some of things may have been boondoggles, but many helped create a powerful economy and others were acts of beauty; some were all the above. Now we seem to want government only to promote private wealth. Anything the government can do for the common good or the common wealth is disparaged or even outlawed by the courts as an overextension.

We have big problems, and none bigger than the crises that will be caused by climate change. Government -- collective thinking and expenditure -- is the only way we can weather these crises. Will we allow ourselves to succeed as we once did?

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