Daniel Greenfield writes Where is Our Panama Canal in his excellent blog Sultan Knish. 2/12/13.

Excerpts:

China can build things, for better or worse, because it has the manufacturing capacity to get things done. America no longer has manufacturing capacity, it has bureaucracy. China makes products. America makes government. We make government at home and we export it abroad.

If any country wants to know how to make a big expensive and unwieldy government ruled by the threat of someone screaming racism and someone else promising free birth control for perpetual grad students who one day hope to teach other perpetual grad students or perhaps file lawsuits on their behalf, then we can do that. If you want us to teach you how to make things, go look up some of our books from the first half of the last century. They may have something of relevance to offer on the subject. The America of 2013, whose government is in its own CNN tower, does not.

We can still build the occasional mid-range skyscraper, but there are no Panama Canals in our near future. For all the prattle about infrastructure investments, we don’t spend our money building things, we spend it paying the pensions of a vast ever-increasing bureaucracy. Our Panama Canal is our vast civil service which has kept on growing even as our economy has kept on shrinking.

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