Is planning for America anathema to the pursuit of life, liberty
and happiness? Is it true, as ideologues like Friedrich Von Hayek,
Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand have claimed, that planning leads to
dictatorship, that the state is wholly destructive, and that
prosperity is owed entirely to the workings of a free market? To
answer these questions Ian Wray's book goes in search of an America
shaped by government, plans and bureaucrats, not by businesses,
bankers and shareholders. He demonstrates that government plans did
not damage American wealth. On the contrary, they built it, and in
the most profound ways. In three parts, the book is an intellectual
roller coaster. Part I takes the reader downhill, examining the
rise and fall of rational planning, and looks at the converging
bands of planning critics, led on the right by the Chicago School
of Economics, on the left by the rise of conservation and the
'counterculture', and two brilliantly iconoclastic writers - Jane
Jacobs and Rachel Carson. In Part II, eight case studies take us
from the trans-continental railroads through the national parks,
the Federal dams and hydropower schemes, the wartime arsenal of
democracy, to the postwar interstate highways, planning for New
York, the moon shot and the creation of the internet. These are
stories of immense government achievement. Part III looks at what
might lie ahead, reflecting on a huge irony: the ideology which
underpins the economic and political rise of Asia (by which America
now feels so threatened) echoes the pragmatic plans and actions
which once secured America's rise to globalism.
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