Abundance and Robert Moses

A half-truth

Abundance. It’s the buzzword ricocheting around elite circles with, dare I say, abundant frequency. The idea is simple: America has lost the capacity to build. Whether it be by the government or the private sector, projects are getting bogged down in delays and cost overruns. The key, according to the book “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is to cut regulation and increase government capacity. Rather than throwing up roadblocks, government needs to focus on providing goods and services that will benefit everyone. If successful, at least according to Klein and Thompson, by 2050 Americans could be living in a world of abundance, where living standards have increased for all.

This is nothing new. I wrote about the lack of state capacity a year ago. Many others have tread this ground. That said, “Abundance” is an important book. It’s continuing the conversation about what went wrong with government over the last half-century. These are the discussions we need to be having in America right now. What doesn’t work in this country, and how can we fix it.

Looming of all this is a titanic figure in American history: Robert Moses. He’s easily the most influential state and local politician the average person has never heard of. Despite never being elected, he was for decades one of the most powerful government officials, some would argue the most powerful government official, in the city and state of New York. Take a look at the offices he held, many at the same time:

• Long Island State Park Commission (President, 1924–1963)

• New York State Council of Parks (Chairman, 1924–1963)

• New York Secretary of State (1927–1929)

• Bethpage State Park Authority (President, 1933–1963)

• Emergency Public Works Commission (Chairman, 1933–1934)

• Jones Beach Parkway Authority (President, 1933–1963)

• New York City Department of Parks (Commissioner, 1934–1960)

• Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (Chairman, 1934–1968)

• New York City Planning Commission (Commissioner, 1942–1960)

• New York State Power Authority (Chairman, 1954–1962)

• New York's World Fair (President, 1960–1966)

• Office of the Governor of New York (Special Advisor on Housing, 1974–1975)

What did Moses do with all that power and influence? Build. He built parks, bridges, swimming pools, power plants, the United Nations, and more than anything, roads. His “Moses men” traveled the state, ripping up tenement housing, historic buildings, and entire neighborhoods to be put in service of the people, and more commonly, of cars. Robert Caro’s magnum opus about Robert Moses, “The Power Broker”, is one of the greatest biographies ever written.

According to many proponents of the abundance agenda, Moses is the villain. As government officials around the country began to realize maybe it wasn’t great to destroy entire cities for the sake of a few highways, they responded. Gone are the days when the government can uproot thousands of people with little consultation. Articles from the New Republic, the Economist, New York Magazine, the New Yorker, and others have all tied Robert Moses to a backlash against unconstrained building that overcorrected and led us to where we are today. As one online commentator succinctly puts it, “Abundance is Robert Moses but good.”

This is somewhat accurate. Robert Moses did go too far. He acted with an iron paternalism that ignored the complaints of the thousands he uprooted. He acted as if he was above politics, proudly proclaiming he had never done a political deal in his life, when his entire career was one deal after another. Today, his reputation is being partially rehabilitated. After all, he did get things done. Better than anyone, before or since, he knew how to find the exit of the bureaucratic labyrinth. Especially in the first half of his career, before he amassed so much power he didn’t have to listen to anyone, his projects did make New York a better place.

The current critics of our ability to build, however, are wrong in two regards. First, the policies and regulations that have severely diminished state capacity are not just in response to one man. Robert Moses was the most successful proponent of urban renewal, but he was far from the only one. Cities across the United States, from Hartford to San Francisco, went through similar waves of destruction and development during the mid-20th century. Moses makes for a convenient boogeyman, but the reality is he was the pinnacle of a nationwide trend. It’s hard to argue the destruction of the Mexican-American community of Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles to build Dodger Stadium had anything to do with Moses. Urban renewal was the near-universal goal of American urban planners after World War II, and they brought in the backhoes anywhere they could.

Second, and more importantly, current critics are misframing the problem. For many abundance liberals, the story is simple. America began the interwar period with too little government regulation, where entire neighborhoods were destroyed by Robert Moses types. It became one of too much government regulation. One where nothing can be built because of a vetocracy that allows any one party to stop anything they don’t like. This isn’t incorrect per se, but it represents a fundamentally pro-government bias.

The reality is we didn’t move from a world with a too unconstrained government to a world with an overly constrained one. It’s that we moved from a world with a government that was too powerful in one way to a world with a government that was too powerful in another.

In the wake of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the US government reached its zenith of state capacity. In the 1930s, the federal government built at an astonishing pace. In the 1940s, it mobilized the entire country for war. In the 1950s, the government paved the interstate highway system. It was a time of incredible achievement, but a time without guardrails. Today, the government, whether federal, state, or local, can’t build much of anything. But it can prevent. Today we have a government that’s far too powerful in saying no. It would be one thing if that power only extended to stopping government. The problem is that the government can prevent anyone from doing anything.

Not only could the government no longer build the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam, no one could. I don’t care if Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet all combined their money and technical know-how to, say, build a new third airport in the Chicago area. There is plenty of potential for a third airport. O’Hare is a mess, Midway operating at capacity. If the triumvirate of billionaires bought an industrial area in Northwest Indiana, planned to raze all the buildings and turn the area into a commercial airport, they would not be able to do it. Not this year or this decade. Not ever. There would be years of reviews and reviews of the reviews. Local, state, and federal government agencies would all have their say. Neighbors would complain about the noise. Anti-gentrifiers would fight to prevent the loss of blue-collar factory jobs. Truth be told, I don’t know if any person, company, or organization could open a new airport in the US today. This is why Denver International Airport, the only major US airport less than 50 years old, may be the last major airport to open in the US. Ever.

On the micro scale the same government power exists. Government authority has expanded to stop people from building just about anything. It seems ludicrous to even imagine someone trying to build an extra dwelling on their half-acre suburban property. The protests against such a plan would be apoplectic. Never mind that two dwellings on a half-acre anything but dense. Or that the land in question belongs to the would-be builder. This type of attitude stretches to the smallest of issues. Want to build a 13-by-3½-foot balcony on your home in San Francisco? Good luck. It took this guy a year to get the permitting through the Byzantine municipal process.

The central thread through the excesses of the 20th century and the dearth of the 21st century is not one of too much government yielding to one of too little. It’s one of a government that was too powerful then and it too powerful today, just in different ways. A better way forward is to limit the government from defining what civilization looks like. Leave that up to the people.