All thanks to extensive public subsidies. (Mary Altaffer – AP) Tim Lee offers up a brief history of New York Citys subway system, based on Clifton Hoods book 722 Miles. Private companies had been building above-ground lines in the 19th century on their own. But there was no way to build an underground system without public subsidies:

The public subsidies for the subway system turned out to be quite large: The city eventually chipped in $36.5 million in 1900 and then an additional $123 million in 1911 to extend the lines. Those two early spurts of spending alone equal roughly $3.8 billion in todays dollars.

Lee goes on to ask whether these sorts of infrastructure projects pose a challenge to libertarianism. Were the critics of the vast subsidies used to build New York Citys subway wrong? After all, without the publicly funded system and its extensions, the bucolic farmland in Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens might never have been transformed into todays dense urban neighborhoods. A subway-less New York, Lee adds, would not only have a smaller population, it would likely be poorer per capita. … Maybe over the long run, those subsidies paid for themselves through the expansion of the citys tax base.

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