WPA 2.0

financial reality says...

the 1930’s recovery plans, in which the government went out and hired large numbers of the unemployed, and put them to work. On projects that were worthwhile investments in many cases - many of the the WPA projects around the country are still in use today and are an amazing legacy of that era. Employing 8.5 million people, the WPA built, inter alia:

• 800 airports, including for example New York’s LaGuardia.
• 78,000 bridges
• 125,000 buildings
• 650,000 miles of roadways
• Countless parks, golf courses and works of art.

Could something like this be done today? This is a really interesting exercise in community empowerment and mobilization on a grand scale. The population af the US is about 306 million and about 5% were employed in WPA projects in the 1930s, so today, that would mean about 15 million jobs. Now that's a stimulus package.

What does the community (aka the US) want and need? What resources are available? Who is capable of leading and mobilizing the community to work towards these shared goals?

Think about it...

• shovel-ready projects
• planning, prioritization, risk management, funding, spending oversight
  
• skills available
• knowledge sharing
• training
• logistics - food, housing, transportation
• willing workers (in the 1930s many people would rather go hungry than accept welfare or hand-outs - they were willing to work for food.)

third hand

Lynne Kiesling comments on and provides excepts from P.J. O’Rourke’s Adam Smith column which quotes Adam Smith. Good read.

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence,” Smith told a learned society in Edinburgh (with what degree of sarcasm we can imagine), “but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.”

How then would Adam Smith fix the present mess? ... The answer to a decline in the value of speculative assets is to pay less for them. Job done.

Seems pretty simple. They had bubbles and speculation in Adam Smith's day - The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, so Smith knows what he is talking about.

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

There is an old saying, "Learn from others mistakes. You don't have time to make them all yourself." There is nothing new. All these mistakes have been made before - many times, in fact. But sadly, there are those who are arrogant enough believe that it is different this time.