Dayton Construction

Here's the last Dayton construction update. Here's the same street they've been working on forever.

As you can see, very little has changed. They buried some pipes along the side of the road a few months ago. They added the sidewalks right after. They put out those trees in those bags at least six weeks ago, but they haven't put them in the ground. They added the light poles a few weeks back, but they don't work. In the distance you can see two heavy trucks sitting idle.

The added this road as an exit from the main road several months back.

They put that road in in a little over a month, but then they stopped working on it. The curbs aren't finished and they still have it blocked at the intersection in the distance of the picture. You can drive on it one way in the direction of the picture.

They did some work in the park too.

About two months ago they added back in pretty much the same playground equipment they had removed, but new. There's an additional, smaller play-scape, probably for smaller children. But after they put it in, they didn't finish it. The ground is still dug out about a foot below where they intend it to be. Of course people brought their kids to play on the equipment anyway, so they wrapped the yellow tape around it to stop that.

In addition, they dug a bunch a furrows around the same time, and in the same day they ran wire through the furrows and filled them back in. They started early in the morning and worked until dark that day which proves they can do work in reasonable time frame when they have an incentive, in this case liability for somebody falling in one of those furrows. A week or so ago they added the light poles, but they don't yet work.

Here's a picture of the furrow digging machine.

This expensive piece of capital equipment has been sitting idle since the day it dug the furrows two months ago. In this picture, one piece of equipment is in use while the rest sit idle around it.

You can't see the equipment very well in this picture, but usually there's a bunch of idle equipment sitting out there. Today is unusual because there's a few workers around and one of the pieces of equipment is being used. But all this idle equipment and unusable resources are squandered wealth. This shows equipment and materials that have been taken out of the productive private economy and squandered in the parasitic political economy for over a year now. The Dayton Construction series has documented the squandering of wealth by just one, small government project of dubious value - value that can never be measured because it involves no prices - that started last June and should have been done last summer. But this kind of squandering of wealth is going on all over the city, the state and the country on a massive scale.

This could never happen in the private sector. Either the person in charge would be immediately fired or the company would go bankrupt. But politicians and bureaucrats have a different set of incentives than people in private sector. In the private sector, people are risking their own money on projects, so they finish them rapidly and with high quality so they can maximize their return on investment. But in the parasitic political economy, politicians and bureaucrats use these construction projects to show "your tax dollars at work". Obama even wasted our tax dollars on signs advertising just that for projects funded by his stimulus boondoggle. They're also used as socialist jobs programs that politicians never want to end, so they intentionally drag them out. They end up being the modern equivalent of digging ditches and filling them back in.