A number of left-of-center acquaintances have pointed to Lauren Etter’s article in the Wall Street Journal on decisions on the part of local governments in rural areas to reduce the level of investment in local roads as a sign of national decline:

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

I have to say, this doesn’t strike me as remotely objectionable. Recall that Frank J. Popper and Deborah Popper memorably called for many of the regions in question to become a vast depopulated “Buffalo Commons,” an idea that gained wide currency among U.S. environmentalists. The U.S. is a heavily suburban and urban country. While we want to be sure that rural areas have adequate infrastructure, there is if anything reason to believe that we’ve underinvested in the infrastructure of our most densely-populated regions relative to rural areas. Alyssa Katz has recently described an Obama administration initiative to encourage transit-oriented development.

To be sure, many residents in the counties Etter describes find the tearing up of old roads extremely inconvenient. This was, lest we forget, the impetus behind the so-called “bridge to nowhere” — there were at least a small handful of households that would have benefited from that project, and from countless others that are nevertheless not very cost-effective. One person’s boondoggle is another person’s vital infrastructure project. It is undoubtedly true that other countries, like France, have far better roads than we do. Yet I tend to think it is reasonable to trade a somewhat lower tax burden for less-than-flawless roads. It’s just a question of getting the balance right.

I would go further and argue that rather than invest in legacy infrastructure, we should give some thought to investing heavily in expanded use of freight rail and a more cost-effective and energy-efficient marine transportation system of the kind Phil Longman describes. We can and should leapfrog over existing transportation technologies to the extent possible.

Far from a sign of national decline, I think the fact that local governments are recognizing that they can’t depend on limitless resources is a good sign.

P.S. Some readers think I’m being smugly dismissive of rural areas. My sense is that many state and local governments don’t do a very good job of spending taxpayer dollars, in large part because there is a lack of the fiscal discipline that begets organizational discipline. If property taxes increase every year, you don’t feel the same pressure to deliver better services at lower cost that constrains a for-profit enterprise. But fiscal discipline hurts. That’s the point. No one wants to fire a teacher’s aide or tear up an asphalt road and replace it with gravel if you don’t absolutely have to do it. For many critics on the left, gravel roads represent a grave failure to raise enough revenue — as John Kenneth Galbraith put it, they see a country defined by private affluence and public squalor. I see something different: an opportunity. If voters in the affected communities want better roads, they can vote for higher taxes to pay for them, demand that other public services become more efficient and shift resources from, say, schools to roads, or they can accept that driving will be a somewhat less pleasant experience. There is no other option. Infusions of taxpayer dollars from the federal government are nevertheless taxpayer dollars. We can transfer more resources to rural areas from suburban areas, but that is, in the long term, a trap.