Revisiting the Hoover Dam

A great feat of engineering, but no panacea for modern ills

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Readers' comments


Joe Marlowe


I think America does grand projects really well. Think about:

The Grand Army of the Republic

The Panama Canal


The Arsenal of Democracy

The Defeat of Nazi Germany/The Two Ocean War

The Berlin Airlift

The Marshall Plan

The Interstate Highway System

The Golden Gate Bridge, The Brooklyn Bridge, The Pennsylvania Railroad, the B & O, the C & O, the NYC, the Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Sante Fe, The Rockefeller Center.

Walk from Arlington past the Lincoln Memorial, and along the mall to the Capitol.

These were not things done by people who were unable to think big, who lacked ambition, or who lacked a coherent view of America as a great nation.


Preserving our environment is not "a luxury most people in rich countries are glad to be able to afford." It is a necessity for our long-term prosperity, if not survival.

Connect The Dots

No dam can be built today save a miracle.

Environmentalist put legal roadblocks that will delay a project for decades until all the original suitors are dead or demented.

NIMBYism: Not in My Back Yard Property Owners are equally prickly and over empowered. A project that will benefit millions is held up for the rights of a single curmudgeon loony property owner who wants his privacy to walk around his backyard nude.

Progress is strangled by legal injunctions, enviormental restrictions, and overblown minor concerns.


Is it so terrible that America could not undertake a project such as the Hoover Dam today? No. Is it so terrible that, apart from the vaguest suggestions immediately dismissed for being fiscally infeasible, politically unsupportable, or both, few seem to give any indication of wanting to? That may be a different matter.


There is a good reason the Hoover dam could not be built today: it is an obsolete, old-school project, both in terms of environmental impact and central government over-reach. In short, a scheme for both sides of the political fence to find fault with.

"Ohio" is spot on when he says: We are much more the home of Edison's light bulb and Jobs' Macintosh than Hoover's dam.

I would like to add: Burt Rutan, Sergei Brin, Mark Zuckerburg, and the myriad of backyard tinkerers, software developers and university research departments. When I drove across the Hoover Dam I was mildly impressed. When I went to the Jet Propulsion Lab's open house and saw the robot rovers in their "Mars Yard" test area, I (who am not normally the most patriotic sort) was filled with pride and wonder at these little, yet amazing machines.

If the US wants to embark on a grandiose project, how about the ultimate morale boost: a genuine and fair reform of our ridiculous tax system?


I am not a big fan of Obama's infrastructure "stimulus" notions, for most of the reasons cited in the article. However, I do recognize that certain types of infrastructure can provide a substantial boost to economic growth, the Hoover Dam being one of them.

Even though the dam construction only employed a few thousand workers, the real value of the dam is the electricity that it generates and continues to generate. It is all clean electricity, and more importantly it is provided in massive quantities. Cheap power fuels economic growth by allowing factories and businesses to run more cheaply, especially those businesses involved in manufacturing that relies on electricity to run its heavy equipment.

This is why I am dismissive of plans to build bridges and repave roads -- such infrastructure should be performed because it is needed, and we should not delude ourselves into thinking it is economic "stimulus". On the other hand, if we were to build more clean power plants, like hydroelectric dams or nuclear plants, those would be stimulus projects that keep giving economic benefits for decades, because they are projects that actually MAKE something -- electricity.

WT Economist

When the U.S. spends on infrastructure today, one third the money goes to consultants, and another third goes to the pensions and health benefits of retired construction workers. That leaves one-third for the work, which is also expensive.

There was no "prevailing wage" legislation back in the early 1930s, which promises construction workers on federally funded projects the highest wage and benefit package ever achieved in an area regardless of how sustainable it was. Workers were paid the hard times market wage on that and other projects.

FDR cut federal pay 10%. And the depression wiped out the wealth of the wealthy because there was no bail out of financial assets. They had to go back to earning their keep as well.

cs r

The CBO "says it could spend up to $80 billion a year more on projects that would give an economic return. Mr Obama is an enthusiast: he has proposed investing in green energy and high-speed trains."

Obama is an enthusiast for the spend half of that statement, not the economic return half. Thus green energy and high-speed trains.


Actually the Hoover dam or something like it could be done today. It just needs to be authorized in the legislation and said that no one can challenge it based on any other act. If they did that we could knock them things like a national energy grid, or high speed rail system relativlty quickly.

No 10 year environmental reports, or long drawn our emenimnent domain claims. just plan it and build it.


The Hoover Dam and the man on the moon aside, the US really doesn't do grand pharaonic missions and monuments that well. Both were created as morale-boosting stunts by centralizers, while America's greatest successes have come from decentralized action driven by the profit motive. What the US does well is to allow entrepreneurs to flourish. In today's competitive world, for the US to retain its place as the incubator of new ideas and technology and the companies that exploit them, it must open its doors to the entrepreneurs of the world, by reforming its immigration laws and creating a bureaucratic environment that welcomes new businesses. It should actively seek to retain the foreign graduates of its top schools and encourage them to exploit their ideas here. It should actively encourage more of its own talented young to enter productive professions (i.e. not finance, law or medicine).

So please, no more monuments to the power of central government. That is not America's way. We are much more the home of Edison's light bulb and Jobs' Macintosh than Hoover's dam. We can still make the eyes of a young Indian or Chinese engineer gleam with visions of a successful new startup. That is America's niche; we must exploit it to the hilt.



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