In the ten years since 9/11 the USG has engaged in a surfeit of federal action. Hundreds of thousands of new employees have been hired, millions of pages of regulations and laws have been written, several wars have been started, unprecedented changes in criminal and civil procedure have been approved, and the presumed role of the federal government has expanded into areas never before imagined. Our ongoing economic crisis, the consequence of generations of governmental overindulgence, has been exacerbated by this orgy of post-9/11 USG activity.
I am not alone in arguing that some of this has been counterproductive, much of it has been unconstitutional, and nearly all of it has been wasteful.
But perhaps what frustrates me most about this decade long spree of federal activism and blind, often carefree spending, is that after all the waste and all the questionable action by the federal government, nobody in Washington found a way to rebuild the World Trade Center towers.
Everyone knows the original buildings were less than ideal. Their architectural merit was always in question. When built in 1973 the Towers lacked what is now called "synergy" with many neighboring buildings. Surrounded by classic examples of early American skyscrapers and storied Wall Street firms, the bland, predictable Towers were never the artistic highlight of lower Manhattan. Investors in the complex web of leases and firms and concessions and other legal trappings which constituted the World Trade Center were never entirely pleased with how some of the planet's most valuable real estate was being used. The Towers simply did not generate as much revenue per square foot as other, more modern designs might.
But when the World Trade Center, and several other structures around them, were so tragically destroyed aesthetic and financial concerns were pushed aside by nearly all Americans. The Towers, which before the horror had been at best dismissed and at worst outwardly hated, immediately became loved by the nation. There were prompt and loud calls to rebuild them.
But as the country got on with the very important, very contentious business of arguing how best to prevent another such attack, the discussion over how to rebuild the Towers morphed, or was manipulated, into a debate about what to do with the site. There were calls to rebuild the Towers, but government tiptoed around the idea of directing the private investors in the area about how best to utilize their interest in the site. Eventually, through a complex and opaque series of agreements between the multitude of governments involved and the major investors in the area that had once been the World Trade Center, an odious compromise was reached.
It was agreed that a new, more profitable skyscraper would be built on the site. A respectful museum and memorial would be constructed. But the Towers would not be rebuilt.
Why is it that amongst a surge in federal involvement in nearly every facet of our lives, Washington failed to strong arm the parties involved in the Ground Zero site into rebuilding the Towers, as the nation wanted?
While Americans were arguing over whether or not the USG needed to declare war to invade Iraq, or if government could prevent a mosque from being built near the former World Trade Center, or if the federal government should take money from the Chinese and use it to pay off investors who bought houses they could not afford, someone in New York shined two blue lights up in the air once a year and proceeded to construct a new building where the Towers should have been rebuilt.
How is it that in ten years of the USG arbitrarily telling investors they could not short sell stocks, ordering Americans to remove their shoes, detaining US citizens without the right of habeas corpus, limiting the profits of insurance companies by statute, and mandating what profits petroleum companies can earn, no one in Washington thought to apply the same collectivist principals to perhaps the one area in the country which needed a centralized effort?
Before marching children through porn scanners in our airports and requiring citizens to register every purchase of gold coins over a certain amount with the USG and preventing Americans from opening certain overseas bank accounts without federal approval or encouraging people to be paranoid via a useless color graph from a newly invented cabinet office with an Orwellian name, the USG should have nationalized the lower Manhattan site and dumped several billion dollars into the location to rebuild the Towers.
It took six years to build the original Towers.
It is an absolute embarrassment that ten after 9/11 we have not rebuilt them. On the anniversary of the most brutal attack in our history we can point only to an incomplete structure as the vertical memorial for the site.
I have not seen the new 9/11 memorial, which I hope and assume is somber and appropriate. But I am certain it would honor the losses of that day even more to know the memorial is in the shadow of two massive, defiant, rebuilt Towers.
Instead, two years from now, the memorial will rest below a structure which looks nothing like the original Towers and which will be, shamefully, behind four other buildings for title of tallest in the world.
Imagine if a competent political commentator had been frozen on September 12, 2001 and then reanimated today, ten years later, and taken to Ground Zero. Suppose he were asked to guess what had transpired in the United States since the attacks. I would suggest only two conclusions could be reached upon seeing the present site at Ground Zero. One, the expert would assume that the partially completed building, a bastardization of what should now be standing strong in lower Manhattan, was the consequence of some massive, laissez-faire attitude which had swept the country post-9/11. How else to explain the inability of this nationally important site to express the wishes of the American people? Surely the greedy capitalists must have convinced Washington that the attacks were due to Big Government, and only a rollback in federal authority could promote security. Two, the observer might guess that another attack had transpired, taking down the USG-led effort to rebuild the Towers which must surely have blossomed after the 9/11 tragedy.
In the days after 9/11, when we were all so passionate about being resolute and moving forward, no one would have imagined that a decade later we would settle for what is still unfinished at Ground Zero.
Many errors have been made since 9/11. Many of those mistakes are understandable. We have been blessed with two decent neighboring countries and two insulating oceans. Our reaction to being attacked at home is not entirely incomprehensible given our almost two centuries of isolation from foreign aggression. I have faith in the US. It is unknown how we will remedy the many breaches of civil liberties which have taken place in the past ten years, or how we will take our medicine and curtail our unnecessary spending, or how we will reorient our security apparatus appropriately. But we will, eventually, do what needs to be done.
One immediate, costly, but necessary action we could take to fix our mistakes though, is to get rid of that embarrassment growing over lower Manhattan and rebuild the Towers. Build them precisely the same as they were before so they are a reminder and a memorial. Let them be a warning sign that we are enduring and a billboard that we are assertive. Reinforce them with whatever it takes to make them safe; fireproof elevators or balloon escape pods or whatever else is necessary to make them usable. Put missiles on top and have F35s circle them every minute of everyday, if that is what's needed. But rebuild them. Change only one thing: make them the tallest buildings in the world, bigger than that ostentatious hotel in Dubai or whatever hundred-plus story skyscraper the Chinese are throwing up this week. Make those things so tall you can see them from Boston and when a visitor stares up at them from the memorial below they can't help but think "Wow, they're back- and bigger. Way bigger."
After ten years of making many mistakes, it's time to start correcting some of the things we've done wrong.
Let's rebuild the Towers.
Sensible libertarian views on nearly everything- except foreign affairs.