tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post9111642246018714695..comments2024-03-26T14:19:33.332-07:00Comments on Bench Grass: The Electric City, VI: Royers Lock: Or, the Fall of AntwerpErik Lundhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-2556657100122862482014-09-11T19:09:54.959-07:002014-09-11T19:09:54.959-07:00The story as I understand it is that the Alcan co...The story as I understand it is that the Alcan contractors were "government entrepeneurs" of the same breed as Kaiser and his Five Company associates, Higgins and Budd. That is, that they were strong supporters of the Administration.<br /><br />That being said, the connection does not exactly jump out of the available information, apart from the fact that the contractors are heavily concentrated in Iowa and Minnesota for maximum electoral impact in states that the Roosevelt coalition had won in 1940 but could be expected to have difficulty holding. Maybe something will jump out when I track down the contemporary press coverage. <br /><br />Now I am just wondering how "Alcan" migrated from its attachment to the Alaska Highway to the Aluminum Company of Canada. Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-301617248665333932014-09-11T18:12:58.002-07:002014-09-11T18:12:58.002-07:00I think even the Alaska Highway is constrained by ...I think even the Alaska Highway is constrained by greed; who were the contractors? Where did that money go?<br /><br />What would have happened if the not-obviously-cost-constrained WWII spending had tried to, I don't know, provide free health care or federal schools for blacks? The idea that there was free money was real, but it was also sharply constrained in use in terms of who it benefited.<br /><br />The Sixties can be considered as a failed attempt to get a different motivator; the problem there is that the folks profiting from war aren't much constrained by scruples and they really don't want someone else getting at the machinery built for war on a moment's notice. (War does get you around class issues and race issues very easily, war might be the politically easiest thing because it actually is, there might even be an inverse correlation between political willingness to embrace war and political ability to deal with the hard problems.)Graydonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09839374676813519438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-74579940596501550612014-09-10T12:40:52.488-07:002014-09-10T12:40:52.488-07:00Let's think about this, put yourself in the pl...Let's think about this, put yourself in the place of a guy who is delaying retirement from the Alaska desk of the Department of the Interior because of the Japanese menace in 1942. You can be in the position of someone whose first boss worked for Seward in 1867, with a lifetime's experience of trying to turn a place that can export gold and furs and fish into a place where the Department doesn't have to foot the bill for schools. Seventy-five years of failure as you try to persuade people to go there and be ratepayers with every kind of incentive in terms of free land and travel subsidies.<br /><br />Nothing. Then along come the Japanese and there's an argument for building a 1500 mile road through raving wilderness to a town in the middle of Alaska. Seventy years later, the town is still there, with a university campus even!<br /><br />This didn't happen out of taxes. The Federal Government did raise taxes, but the revenues raised were nothing like enough to fund projects like this. In fact, the dubious strategic value of the Highway demonstrates, as clearly as it is possible to demonstrate, that WWII was not constrained by costing at all. There was an implicit promise to tax back the money spent in the future, but it was mainly interest rates lower than inflation that did the work. Yet even as fiscal repression "euthanised the rentier," it created equity gains that actually benefitted the active investor.<br /><br />So it's not greed. At least, I don't think that it's greed. Laziness might be more on target, the typical human assumption that if you shirk the work, someone else (Mom!) will do it. Someone else will move to Alaska because reasons (people are crazy), and that means I don't have to pay taxes to build an Alaska Highway --even if, in the long run, it's in my best interests. <br /><br />Obviously there needs to be a motivator to get people on board with fixing it themselves. The problem, I suspect, is as simple as that historically we've had that motivator --war--, and we have yet to face the fact that we need a replacement. <br /><br />Or a war. I'm pretty sure Putin is looking at us funny. Him and Merkel. I mean, look at that smirk. It's like there's something funny going on. That we amuse them. <br /><br />Alex, at least, is lucky that he lives in a country that lives in constant terror of having the Falklands taken away from it. Or is "terror" quite the right word here?Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-74429082396618183822014-09-08T10:42:58.021-07:002014-09-08T10:42:58.021-07:00The Antwerp/loggie stuff is really superb. The Antwerp/loggie stuff is really superb. Alexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17153530634675543954noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-29893735766187426982014-09-08T10:40:38.253-07:002014-09-08T10:40:38.253-07:00If you look at the facts, and the facts say you ca...If you look at the facts, and the facts say you can't have what you most want, you either do the hard work of adjusting what you want, or you pick a delusion. (Exactly what delusion is involved in the Jagdtiger is debatable, I think; the facts were "we can't stop the Red Army", and perhaps the delusion was "because they're building tanks faster than we can destroy them".)<br /><br />You can't have security through wealth, power, or control; security takes general social success, broad agreement among statistically everybody that the present run of society is making all its participants better off. The usual delusion undertaken when faced with this is to decide that greed is a virtue. (Happens over and over again through human history; even just Western Europe has bunches of cyclic examples, monks being burned at the stake for saying in writing that the ten commandments had been replaced by one, "bring hither the money".)<br /><br />So, in the case of the electric city, you run into the distinction between <i>hoard</i> and <i>treasure</i>; war is the only socially-acceptable reason to convert hoard, the pile of money locked away, into treasure, broadly circulating value that creates and re-affirms social relationships and obligations. It's been two generations since treasure was a reasonable public stance because there's a bug in the wetware and the greed-is-good camp repeat and repeat that greed-is-good so the only legitimate form of money is the hoard.<br /><br />The amount useful available is certainly shrinking. (The climax forest shades out the ground, and dies, and burns, and then you get something else.)Graydonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09839374676813519438noreply@blogger.com