Dewey Beach, Delaware, September 2, 2025 --  

America has a real problem building anything. It's time to get the lawyers out of the way.

When the shiny next generation Acela trains started between Washington and Boston last week, critics had a field day about their slower speed. Topping out at only about 150 miles per hour, the first trips were reportedly longer than those of their predecessors -- thanks to congestion and an old track network that was never designed for high speed rail.¹ Compare this to trains in Europe, Japan and China that run at 200 miles per hour or more.

Why doesn't America have real high speed rail? Only in California is construction underway for a modern railway that designed to reach the 200 mph plus speeds seen elsewhere, but this is years behind schedule and billions over budget. The project is limited to the open lands of California's Central Valley and the Trump administration attempting to block $4 billion in Federal funds.²

California's high speed rail authority is now considering to re-routing the track to save money, bypassing the city of Merced to dead end in the garlic farming town of Gilroy, where travellers would take the existing slow Caltrain tracks to San Francisco and Silicon Valley³. Ugh.

Sadly, America's construction woes are not limited to high speed rail. America's has recently struggled to build new semiconductor fabs, new ships and new housing. Analyst Francis Fukuyama, a longtime advocate of liberal democracy and the rule of law, argues that excessive regulation and rulemaking has made it difficult to build anything in America, especially in liberal states like California. This liberal failing opens up political opportunities for authoritarians like President Trump who promise to get things done by pushing the rule of law aside.⁴

Dan Wang, a Canadian analyst on China goes further. In his new book, Wang argues that China is able to build things far more quickly than America because China is run by engineers and America is run by lawyers.⁵ Where America's lawyers focus on making rules to protect every stakeholder in every project, China's engineers focus only on building. This is not always good, as projects often trample the rights of people in the way, or worse, target engineering efforts on people deemed problematic like China's Uighur minority.

Communist China's social engineering of minorities should give Americans pause about putting the engineers broadly in charge. Recall that several of the September 11th hijackers had studied engineering. There is some evidence that engineers are disproportionally found in extremist movements.⁶ Best to keep a few lawyers around just to hold those engineers in check.

Yes, America could certainly use more engineering and less lawyering. But America should be careful not to go too far in giving up the rule of law in favor of building things.

Worries about rivals' building faster than the United States have been made long before China ever came on the scene. In the 1950s and 1960s it was the Soviet Union, building impressive hydroelectric and nuclear plants that put American projects to shame. In the 1970s and 1980s it was Japan that was building auto and electronic plants that were out-competing America. We've heard this song before.

The problem with breakneck building, especially by authoritarian regimes, is that much of it goes to waste. Soviet factories made products that were worth less than the raw materials fed into them. Japanese plants were overbuilt leading to falling prices and decades of Japanese stagnation. China's housing market is similarly overbuilt, leaving tower cities as ghost towns and stoking worries about a financial crisis that has loomed for over a decade.

Clearly, America has the exact opposite problem. Its under supply of housing has made booming cities so expensive that workers can't afford to live there. This is a crazy and destructive limit on growth. While America should not blindly copy China and should never give up it's rule of law, it must ratchet way back on letting special interests block projects that are beneficial to Americans as a whole.

Notes:

1. Wall Street Journal, Amtrak's New Acela Trains Are Here. They're Moving Slower Than the Old Ones, August 28, 2025

2. California High-Speed Rail Authority, 2025 Project Update Report, August 2025

3. Ibid.

4. Fukayama, Francis, An Afternoon With Francis Fukuyama, August 14, 2025

5. Wang, Dan, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, August 2025

6. New York Times, Engineering Terror, September 10, 2010