Tweet [1]
Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch explain [2] with eloquence and spirit why what Adam Smith called “the man of system [3]” is not visionary but, rather — and at best — self-absorbed and out-of-touch.
Here’s a slice from Gillespie’s and Welch’s fine essay:
“Our highways are clogged with traffic,” he noted, before unveiling his big fix: Shiny new trains that go almost twice as fast as cars. Forget that, as urban historian Joel Garreau has long documented [6], our country has been decentralizing its living and working patterns for decades now, migrating from virtually all urban centers (except maybe for booming Washington, D.C. [7]) to relatively low-density suburbs. In a big, spread-out country where individualized service at the coffee stand, on cable TV, and in your computer is the new normal, our chief visionary officer is talking about a one-size-fits-all solution that will surely bomb even bigger than NBC’s Supertrain [8].