Let's talk for a minute about the impact of government. Interstate highways, for example, are not built by nature or by God but by government. Since the 45,000-mile interstate system was approved by Congress in 1956, it has transformed the United States. Quite simply, an 18-wheel tractor trailer—and I say 18 wheels because that's how many the typical truck has, and that's not including wheels on the trailer trucks (now you see double trucks or even triple trucks on the interstates), but let's just take a plain truck—an 18-wheel tractor-trailer truck is not easily going to be driven around in New York City. If you drive one, try to park it, or do anything else with a big truck in the city, you intuitively feel that it is not a match made in heaven. The problem has to do with a decision, made in 1811, to align the streets in a grid and to make them a certain width. These stipulations weren't changed because somebody invented rubber tires or internal- combustion engines or big trucks.
We live in a national economy that has favored the truck over the railroad and that thus has been no benefactor of New York City. Indeed, what we have seen, which brings us back to manufacturing, is that, in part because of government decisions, it is now cheaper to build a brewery in Pennsylvania, or even in North Carolina, and ship beer to consumers over the interstate highways than it is to maintain plants in Brooklyn. When beer was sold mostly in glass bottles, they had to be returned to the brewery, and so it was expedient that it be located near where most of the beer was being sold. Now that you can put beer in a disposable can and ship it from North Carolina, it's goodbye can, and you don't want to see it again. Let somebody else pick it up. The way consumer goods like beer are now packaged and marketed has made it more difficult for New York to compete as a manufacturing center.
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