This May 13, 2005, Review & Outlook editorial is subtitled "It shouldn't surprise us that nothing is rising from the World Trade Center site". It begins:
French billionaire Francois Pinault announced this week that, fed up with delays and bureaucratic hassles, he was calling off a project to build a $190 million art museum near Paris to house his collection of modern art. He will instead install the paintings in an 18th-century palazzo in Venice. France will be the poorer for it, both because of the cultural loss and the loss of investment that will now not be made in rehabilitating the site--a derelict Renault factory on an island in the Seine.
Americans frustrated by the delay in rebuilding at the World Trade Center site in New York cannot consider a move elsewhere. But the culprits here have many of the same characteristics--and are having some of the same effects--as the bureaucrats who sank Mr. Pinault's French museum project.
But what I want for my files is this bit from midway down:
Both tales put us in mind of Frederic Bastiat. The great 19th-century French economist was fond of observing that often the most salient facts are those you can't see. In a Journal op-ed on the 200th anniversary of Bastiat's birth, Bob McTeer, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, explained the unseen with one of Bastiat's famous examples: An observer might note that when a vandal breaks a bakery window, the baker hires a glazier to fix it, and he in turn spends his pay on something else, and so on. Thus, according to the fallacy, the vandal actually generates economic activity. What isn't seen is what the baker didn't spend his money on because he had to repair his window--a bigger kitchen, another store, what-have-you.
Bureaucrats and their red tape often play the vandal in the modern world, silently stifling what might have been and leaving no evidence of what's lost. In both Paris and New York, it seems, arrogance and egos are also part of the toxic mix.
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