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"The United States has the unfortunate distinction of having some of the highest transportation infrastructure costs in the world. Urban rail costs in the United States are 50 percent higher than in Germany, double the costs of Norway, and nearly triple the costs of Sweden. Phase One of New York’s Second Avenue Subway was built at the eye-watering cost of $2.5 billion per mile, eight to twelve times the cost of similar projects in European countries. Phase Two is budgeted even higher, at $4 billion per mile. The exorbitant costs of rail construction in the United States mean that many such projects never get off the drawing board. In cities such as Austin, Atlanta, New York, and Philadelphia, enormous projected costs have resulted in rail projects being canceled or scaled back significantly. And it’s not only rail infrastructure. Road tunnels, highway bridges, and roadways are all more expensive to build in the United States than in major European countries…"

"The mass offshoring of a high-innovation sector in which the United States has been a global leader for decades has been happening with the knowledge and approval of pharmaceutical executives looking to make short-term profits. Naturally, it would have disastrous consequences for the United States. Beyond the national security concerns associated with losing biotech to a peer strategic adversary, biotech has become a valuable industry that provides patients with lifesaving drugs, scientists and lab technicians with high-quality jobs, and formerly deindustrialized cities with hubs of innovation. The loss of biotech to China is imminent, and it is essential for national leaders and policymakers to stem the flow with an industrial policy for biotech…"

"When containerization arrived in force through the 1960s and 1970s, Manhattan’s waterfront lost. Its piers became obsolete. The neighborhoods built around dock work hollowed out over a generation. The container didn’t reward proximity to the city or historical primacy or labor skill. We are at an equivalent moment right now, and almost nobody is looking at the land. If overland freight cost approaches zero as a result of autonomous trucking, the premium for proximity to intermodal terminals weakens and manufacturing location math changes. The same bet available to buyers of land in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1958 is available today. Taking it requires one to see what the old infrastructure is about to stop rewarding, and what the new constraint is about to start requiring…"

"There is a temptation to categorize Texas and California under the two states’ traditional labels: Texas, the land of property rights; California, the land of regulation. But the truth is nearly the reverse. Texas does not actually hold that all property is sacred in the way property is commonly considered. It holds that the productive, extractive use of property outranks the passive holding of it. In California, a neighbor’s right to be heard can stop you from building on your own land; in Texas, a stranger’s right to use it can take it from you. As our legal academy is fond of pointing out, property is a bundle of rights, with none more impactful than possession and development. California has made the first sacred, Texas the second. But how did these two states develop such opposing systems of property rights? To answer that question requires winding back to the moment that both decided that they had had enough of that great American bogeyman, the railroad…"

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Reforging American Industrial Deterrence and Reclaiming the Common Good

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