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Jewish World Review
Sept. 5, 2006
/ 12 Elul 5766
Musings, random and otherwise
By
Jeff Jacoby
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
If you were one of the journalists kidnapped in Gaza last month and ordered at
gunpoint to become a Muslim, what would you have done? Fox News reporter Steve
Centanni and photographer Olaf Wiig announced their acceptance of Islam on a
videotape released by their kidnappers — "because they had the guns," Centanni
later said, "and we didn't know what the hell was going on."
Whether their acquiescence was an act of cowardice or of prudence, reasonable people
can debate. Clearly it wasn't their only choice. If I were ever told, with a gun to
my head, to recite the shahada or die, I hope I would have the courage to take the
bullet.
And I hope I would remember the example not of Centanni and Wiig, but of Fabrizio
Quattrocchi, an Italian security guard taken hostage in Iraq in 2004. Quattrocchi's
jihadi captors, intending to make a video of an infidel's craven death, ordered him
to kneel beside an open grave with a hood on his head. Defiantly, he stood up,
tried to rip off the hood, and shouted, "I will show you how an Italian dies!"
They murdered him an instant later, but he died bravely, on his feet, refusing with
his last breath to be humiliated by savages.
Whenever disaster strikes, some sage invariably declares that the devastation is
actually good news, since the money spent on rebuilding will give a boost to the
economy.
Last week that hoary economic fallacy showed up in, of all places, The
Economist. In a report marking Katrina's first anniversary, the magazine
discerned a "silver lining" in the storm's massive damage: "There are
plenty of jobs in New Orleans these days."
That recalled USA Today's headline after Florida's terrible run of
hurricanes in 2004: "Economic growth from hurricanes could outweigh
costs." The story quoted an economist who acknowledged the "real
pain" caused by the destruction. "But from an economic point of view
it is a plus," he said. In 2001, Paul Krugman had said much the same
thing about 9/11: "Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror
attack . . . could even do some economic good," he wrote.
This is like calling it an economic "plus" when your car is totaled,
since you now have to spend thousands of dollars to buy a new one. But
of course that's illogical — the car dealer's gain is negated by your
loss. If your car hadn't been wrecked, you would have spent that money
on something else — a sale that some other vendor will now be denied.
Similarly, the billions spent to clean up and rebuild after a Katrina or
a 9/11 represent not a net gain, but a net loss. But for the disaster,
those billions could have been channeled to more productive uses.
Instead they must be spent merely to regain lost ground.
"Traffic congestion is choking our cities, hurting our economy, and
reducing our quality of life," begins a new report from the Reason
Foundation, the respected libertarian think tank. Rush-hour gridlock
paralyzes 39,500 lane-miles of roadway each year, eating up $63 billion
in lost time and fuel. But much worse is to come.
By 2030, the number of severely congested lane-miles will reach nearly
60,000 per year, an increase of more than 50 percent. Commuters in the
largest metropolitan areas will spend 65 percent more time in traffic
than they do now. Within 25 years, at least a dozen major cities will be
choked with travel delays worse than in today's Los Angeles, which is
notorious for having the worst traffic congestion in America.
The solution is the obvious one: Build more highways, and manage them
more intelligently. "The old canard 'we can't build our way out of
congestion' is not true," the authors write. They estimate that 104,000
new lane-miles will be needed by 2030, at a cost of about $21 billion a
year, much of which could be raised through electronic tolling. The
return on that investment would be a stunning 7.7 billion fewer hours
spent in traffic each year, along with all the wealth and freedom those
time savings would generate.
All this is heresy, of course, to the car-haters and PC nannies who are forever
lecturing us to quit driving and use mass transit. But we are overwhelmingly a
nation of drivers; the real "mass transit" is the traffic on our highways. If the
highways don't grow to keep up with that traffic, the strangulating misery of
gridlock will only get worse.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Jeff Jacoby is a Boston Globe columnist. Comment by clicking here.
Jeff Jacoby Archives
© 2006, Boston Globe
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