Property owners steamrolled by highwaymen
Friday, March 1 2002
To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero
Candy-maker and John Birch Society founder Robert Welch was labeled nutty as a fruitcake when he suggested that Dwight Eisenhower was an "agent of the communist conspiracy." But in one area, Welch's crazy charge contained a nugget of truth.
You see, Ike fathered the Interstate Highway System. His administration's flacks proudly called it the "greatest public works project in history," and maybe it was. But the Interstate program was also a socialist melding of industry and military that did more than almost any other act of government to uproot Americans.
Like so many of Leviathans projects, the IHS was conceived in wartime. In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt's Interregional Highway Committee recommended that the federal government build a 41,000mile interstate system. (As though Washington wasn't busy enough.)
