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Comment by chvid | Hacker News Reader

I just find this crazy - you can have good public infrastructure without be authoritarian.

But you cannot have good public infrastructure without a strong state (strength on its own isn't authoritarianism).

A lot of western governments are rather weak, I swear baumols cost disease and spiraling social/retirement/debt spending has crippled their ability to provide for the public.

In the US, it's mostly because the urban planning field was extremely embarrassed about "urban renewal" (rightly so) and switched to a new ideology that just completely forbids ever doing anything in case it's bad for anyone.

It's also partly because they read The Population Bomb in the 70s and literally decided to ban housing/transit in order to stop people from having kids.

Switzerland has a weak federal government. The cantons are smaller than US states, but have more autonomy, and a lot of matters are decided by direct democracy. Yet they still seem to have good public infrastructure.

I mean the obvious is that Switzerland is rich, and money is power.

But it's true that public infrastructure is more dependent on local rather than federal governments. I think the best example of weak local governments has to be the UK [1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0DKsMJl6Z8

Of course. Plenty of countries do. It is not that one requires the other. It is that when authoritarians came to power in the last century, many of them initiated lavish public transport projects.

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