Reason’s Matt Welch pushes back here against another piece of Obamablather, namely his claim that the Golden Gate Bridge was a great federal project.
Think about Obama’s “vision” he wants voters to embrace — government projects that benefit us all. For every one of those (and just when was the last time the government built something where the benefits exceeded the costs?) there are many more where costs greatly exceed the benefits. And Obama does not comprehend that there are opportunity costs to everything. The more the government does, the less is left of scarce resources for the private sector to use productively. Would Obama say that the Soviet Union, where government did almost everything and the private sector was mostly illegal, was a great success?
