Lex Anteinternet: A Memorial Day Reflection on the Second World War....:
A need for an Interstate Highway System, by which is meant a good one, was also noted.
This is one of those things where I'd disagree. It's often stated that Eisenhower was really impressed with the German Autobahn, which was really a massive German public works project during the pre war Nazi years there, and he may have really been. But I think it was the ongoing evolution of the automobile that made the Interstate Highway System come in. It was billed a defense program but that was, quite frankly, a funding charade.
What that does bring up, however, is the massive expansion of government that started with the Great Depression and which kept on keeping on during World War Two and which never went away thereafter. It wasn't until the Reagan administration of the 1980s that contraction of any kind started, and its never contracted to its pre 1932 level. Prior to the Great Depression the nation would never have undertaken a highway construction project on a national level, and not until World War Two would the country thought of trying to pass it off as a defense measure.
That act, of course, lead to the demise of passenger rail in US, so its another thing that had a mixed result.
