Massachusetts residents who tuned in to the Olympics opening
ceremony saw a new 30-second campaign commercial from
the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Elizabeth Warren, that
said America should be more like Communist China.

“We’ve got bridges and roads in need of repair and thousands of
people in need of work. Why aren’t we rebuilding America?” asks
Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School who served in the Obama
administration. “Our competitors are putting people to work,
building a future. China invests 9% of its GDP in
infrastructure. America? We’re at just 2.4%. We can do
better.”

The ad juxtaposes robust Chinese cranes and dump trucks with
decaying American bridges and idle but sympathetic-looking American
workers wearing hard-hats.

Warren has been in the news lately as an inspiration for
President Obama’s “you
didn’t build that” comment. And Mr. Obama himself has been
making somewhat similar points about infrastructure on the campaign
trail. On July 27, the same day Warren announced her
new ad, Mr. Obama, campaigning in Virginia, said,
“I think it makes sense for us to take half the savings from war
and let’s use it to do some nation-building here at home. Let’s
make sure that we’re rebuilding our roads and our bridges. Let’s
build broadband lines into rural communities and improve our
wireless networks and rebuild our ports and airports. We can put
people to work right now doing the work that America needs
done.”

Warren’s approach is so flawed that it’s amazing that her
campaign would spend the money on putting it into a prime-time
Olympics commercial that was presumably designed not to alienate
people but rather to get them to vote for her. You really have to
see it to believe it.

The first problem is mathematical. U.S. gross domestic product
is about $15 trillion a year. Increasing infrastructure
“investment” to the 9% Chinese level that Warren cites would mean
an additional $1 trillion a year in government spending. That’s an
immense spending increase. To put it in context, the entire federal
government spent about $3.6 trillion in 2011, on revenues of about
$2.3 trillion.

Where would this money come from? Not tax increases, right?
Warren has already reportedly promised
nearly a trillion dollar tax increase, spread over ten years, by
raising the estate tax, imposing the Buffett Rule, and letting the
Bush tax cuts expire for those earning $250,000 a year or more. But
that money, she has said, would go toward deficit reduction. If
Warren really wants to spend $1 trillion a year more on
infrastructure, she’d need to eliminate all national defense
spending ($705 billion) or all Social Security spending ($730
billion) and then find another more than quarter trillion dollars.
Or else she’d have to go on the biggest borrowing or taxing binge
in American history.

Math, though, is hardly the only problem with emulating China’s
approach to infrastructure spending. History is another. America
and China are at different junctures in our development. America
built a lot of bridges, tunnels, and highways in the 1950s and
1960s when China was stuck under Communism. A lot of China’s
spending now isn’t going to outpace America but to catch up with
things that we’ve had here for decades, like potable water and a
population that is mostly non-rural.

Finally, not all of China’s infrastructure spending is worth
emulating. The Chinese Communist treatment of those who stand in
the way of their projects makes Robert Moses, the mastermind of so
many of New York’s neighborhood-destroying highways, look like
Mother Teresa. For example, the group International
Rivers reports that
1.2 million people were displaced to construct the Three Gorges
Dam. That $40 billion project also reportedly had devastating
effects on the Chinese river dolphin, river sturgeon, and
paddlefish.

China is able to spend so much on infrastructure because it’s an
unfree country. It lacks the rule of law that lets American
community groups wage legal and political battles against big
government projects. Warren may protest that when she’s talking
about “infrastructure” she mainly means maintaining existing roads
and bridges, not building brand new projects that flatten urban
neighborhoods or destroy scenic rivers. But that’s not what’s
happening in China.

One of the ironies here is that some of the lawyers opposing big
proposed American infrastructure projects on environmental or
eminent domain or racial discrimination grounds were trained by
Warren and her colleagues at Harvard Law School and at other
similar institutions like the University of Chicago, where Barack
Obama taught after attending Harvard Law School. Such opposition,
sometimes spurious, can succeed in delaying and raising the cost of
private development projects even if the opponents ultimately do
not prevail in court or in the political process. Free-market fans
tend to like the eminent domain suits and dislike the ones about
snail darters, and it is a distinction worth maintaining.

But if the choice is between having people like Elizabeth Warren
and Barack Obama in law schools training students to block these
infrastructure projects, or having them in the government taxing
the rest of us to pay for more of them, I’m glad to live in America
rather than Communist China. Here in America, at least, the people
may not get to elect the law professors, but we sure do get to vote
on the president and senators.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and
author of Samuel Adams: A
Life.