This editorial points to some themes I have tried to elaborate here, re the need, for a long time, for a more unified political system, and a more rationally planned industrial policy that would depend on it.
A good reference here to 19th Century infrastructure fragmentation failures, the kind that also resulted in the Civil War. These fragmentation failures were hardly 'solved' by the Civil War, which in fact, as David Kaiser has noted on his blog, actually weakened the union.
Nevins, Ordeal of The Union, Volume II, covers some of this ridiculous legislative and entrepreneurial history in good detail in some places, as part of the larger infrastructural, sectional, and political picture he was painting of the run up to the Civil War, but there may be other good books on transportation itself as the main topic, including White's when it comes out.
Terms search many terms, PPP, industrial policy, steel, laissez faire, trading places, manufacturing matters, MITI, game over, etc.
See also Kaiser's current post, and his discussion there of the recognition back in the earlier 20th Century of the need for planning.
War usually makes the need for planning abundantly manifest, but not in the US, where we have been able, until now, because of small scale conflicts, and the Coldness of the Cold War, to politically, economically, and socially, tinker around the exigencies of all conflicts since WW II without resorting to a better, reformed, and rationalized, political structure.
Meanwhile, there has been an enormous shift of economic, and inevitably military, power, elsewhere, a shift which our political system engineered by fighting the wrong foe with the wrong weapons.
Terms search: terms search, cartoon, mise en scene, Popper, Gin
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