Erickson: We Forgot How to Make Big Things

quote:

---

I want to walk you through a set of stories that on the surface have nothing to do with each other, and then I want to show you that they are all the same story. They are the story of a country that used to build things and has decided, slowly and without ever quite admitting it, that building things is too hard.

Start with the missiles. Congressman Mike Turner was on television talking about the ongoing effort to let Ukraine license our Patriot technology and build the missiles themselves, because missile technology is proliferating around the world and defensive technology has to proliferate right along with it. He is right about that. The most powerful, most advanced country in the history of the world is looking at handing another nation the recipe for our best defensive weapon because we cannot make enough of them ourselves. Think about how strange that is. We are not talking about sharing a burden with an ally. We are talking about outsourcing the manufacturing of American security because our own industrial base cannot keep up.

And here is the thing that ought to keep you up at night. Ukraine is a country at war. Ukraine gets bombed every single day. Every night Russian missiles come down on Ukrainian civilians, not soldiers, civilians in their homes. And that country, under those conditions, is out-producing us on drones. I read this morning, and I will be honest with you that I read it on the internet so hold me loosely to the exact number, that Ukraine builds more drones in a month than the United States has in its entire arsenal. We have something like ten thousand drones. They build them by the hundreds of thousands a month. A nation being bombed daily is manufacturing faster than the nation that is not being touched. That should embarrass every single one of us.

So why can we not do it?

For years we told ourselves the problem was consolidation, that we let the defense contractors merge until there were only a handful left, and that is why the supply dried up. I think we misdiagnosed it. The consolidation was not the disease. The consolidation was the immune response. We spent decades strangling these companies with labor rules and unions and federal regulation and state regulation on top of that, and the only way they survived was to grow a thicker neck so the hands around their throat could not quite close. And we are still squeezing.

On top of that we treat the defense industrial base as a jobs program. A congressman wants a base in his district and a contractor in his district because it employs his people, and somewhere along the way the point stopped being to build the weapon and started being to keep the payroll. You cannot run an arsenal that way. You certainly cannot deter Iran that way. The president keeps going back and forth with Iran, tit for tat, in part because we simply do not have the defensive missile capacity to do anything bolder, and now our own commanders are warning that we may not have enough to protect our allies either. We have boxed ourselves in, and we did it with paperwork.

Now take a completely different story that is really the same story. Lake Mead, the giant reservoir out west that the Hoover Dam created, has dropped so low that we are staring at the real possibility that the Hoover Dam can no longer generate power. Read that twice. One of the monuments to American ambition, a dam that a Depression-era country threw up across a canyon because it decided it would, is running short of the water it needs to keep the lights on. Millions of people in the Las Vegas Valley and all down the Colorado River are looking at running out of water and running out of power at the same time.

Why do we not build a desalination plant on the Pacific and pump the water inland to refill Lake Mead?

I raised that issue on social media and I got pushback for it, including from people on my own side, who told me that was a ridiculous project. Let me tell you what I think is ridiculous. Telling three million people in the desert to pack up and abandon their cities because we could not be bothered. We do not have a water shortage in this country. We have a fresh water shortage, and sitting right next to the west is the largest body of water on the planet. Yes, desalination takes energy. That is not a strike against it. That is a necessary use of energy, the same way it is a necessary use of energy to pump gas or to run a hospital. The Roman Empire built aqueducts that carried water hundreds of miles down out of the Alps to Rome, and they did it with hand tools and slaves and no electricity at all. We are the United States of America and we have convinced ourselves we cannot lay a pipeline from the ocean to a lake. Build the tunnels if you have to. Do the big thing.

One of my callers put a finer point on it than I did. We have not built a new oil refinery in this country since 1973. Nineteen seventy-three. We are sitting on an ocean of oil and we have not built the thing that turns it into fuel in over fifty years. That is not a resource problem. That is a will problem.

And that is the thread that ties the missiles and the dam and the refinery together. We have lost the ability to do big things in the private sector, and we lost it on purpose. We buried the builders under stifling regulation and onerous labor law and layer upon layer of government, and then, worst of all, we sapped the profit motive that made anyone want to try in the first place. We used to be the country that put a man on the moon, and now we cannot put a man on the moon anymore. Not because we forgot the math. Because we forgot the nerve and turned the people who can do into the bad guys who get rich when they do.

Here is how the failure completes itself. Say we actually did it. Say we built the desalination plant, laid the pipeline, metered the water, and split the cost fairly among the states that drank it. You know exactly what would happen. Some socialist would stand up and announce that water is a right and you cannot possibly charge for it, and some collection of people in Washington would nod along and decide it is better to let the desert go dry than to let anyone earn an honest dollar solving the problem. Same with the missiles. The moment a company got rich building up our arsenal fast, we would start asking why they are allowed to get rich, as if the getting rich were the scandal and not the empty shelves. We have talked ourselves into treating success as the crime and shortage as the virtue. That is a country losing its nerve dressed up as a country keeping its conscience.

I am not asking the government to build any of this. I am asking the government to get out of the way and hand the profit motive back to the people who actually know how to build, and then let them get rich doing it. Give the private sector a reason to make the missile, refine the oil, desalinate the water, and light the dam, and they will. That is not a fantasy. That is just America before we decided we were too sophisticated for ambition.

This is a failure of imagination, and it is putting our security at risk and putting millions of people in the West at risk of running out of water and power, and almost nobody in charge seems to want to lift a finger about any of it. We used to be the people who did the big thing precisely because it was hard. Somewhere along the way we became the people who explain, at great length and with real conviction, why the big thing cannot be done. I would like us to be the first kind of country again. We still can be. We just have to decide that we want to.

---