A Stitch in Haste

I've seen those big machines come rolling through the quiet pines.
Blue suits and bankers with their Volvos and their valentines.
Give us this day our daily discount outlet merchandise.
Raise up a multiplex, and we will make a sacrifice. ...

Who remembers when it all began, out here in No Man's Land?
Before they passed the Master Plan, out here in No Man's Land.
Low supply and high demand, here in No Man's Land.
--Billy Joel, "No Man's Land"

Earlier this week, the world's highest bridge opened in France. To celebrate this wonderful feat of engineering, and also to acknowledge Tim's important work in the Kelo case, here is a post about bridges -- and central planners -- that originally ran on my blog, A Stitch in Haste, on November 21, 2004, titled "Verrazano-Narrows and the Gap That Was Never Spanned."

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In America we say, "When Hell freezes over." In Italy they say "When the bridge is built." The "bridge" being of course, the oft-promised, never-delivered connection between the Italian peninsula and Sicily.

Recently New York City celebrated the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island. The Verrazano was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened, and remains the second longest to this day.

Being from the Bronx originally and Manhattan currently, the VNB should hold no especial interest to me, but being a libertarian it most certainly does, because the bridge was the last positive achievement by Robert Moses, the worst collectivist in American history; a man whose megalomaniacal rampage left scars that haunt this city to this day.

By 1964, Moses' power and reputation were well on the decline. His control of public housing had proved a disaster, the Cross-Bronx Expressway had decimated a dozen neighborhoods in that borough, the embryonic World's Fair (a pet project of Moses') was getting mired in negative publicity from an accounting scandal (and his million-dollar salary from it), and the battle against Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway -- which would have turned Greenwich Village and SoHo into a giant trench -- was raging, a battle Moses ultimately lost.

But we do have the bridges. They are all beautiful, especially the VNB. True public goods.

Anyway, contemplating all this got me to thinking about something. To the best of my recollection (and I'm pretty sure I've read the entire canon over the years), Ayn Rand never did battle with Robert Moses. Isn't that odd?

The two were "doing their thing" at generally the same time (i.e., the 1950s and 1960s), they were doing it in the same place (New York City) and they were directing it at the same target audience (an intelligentsia trying to decide exactly what role government should play in a modern society).

So, given that they were about as far apart on the philosophical spectrum as possible, and given what Moses was doing to Rand's beloved New York, you would think that she would have written something about him somewhere, no?

This reminds me of something else I read years back: a negative observation by a reviewer that the statist villains in Atlas Shrugged were all, for lack of a better term, wusses. There was no equivalent of Ellsworth Toohey from The Fountainhead.

Is it possible that, in writing Atlas Shrugged and in the long post-Atlas denouement of her career, Rand opted to avoid any "heavy lifting" by not taking on any truly formidable opponents, either in her fiction or in the real world?

Imagine: A live debate between Ayn Rand and Robert Moses. George Lucas eat your heart out.

(Guest-posted earlier today at Freespace.)