Without big government, President Obama likes to suggest, we would all be poor, miserable creatures. For starters, he claims that business became possible only because government built roads and bridges.
Actually, Obama has it backwards. Private business came first, then roads and bridges.
They weren’t originally developed by governments. They were developed by merchants who began establishing trade routes thousands of years ago. In the beginning, before the first Department of Public Works, there were innumerable trails.
Developing trails required that somebody travel, and kings generally didn’t travel unless they were conquering new territory. If they left their territory for an extended period, they would probably have returned to find somebody else ruling the territory that used to be theirs. So it was merchants, hoping to make money, who blazed the trails for regional and long distance trade. At their own expense, merchants determined the most worthwhile places to go and the most efficient ways of getting there.
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