In addition to its Metrorail subway system, Washington DC has some streetcars that you can ride. Unfortunately, to ride them, you have to travel to the Czech Republic.*

The city of Washington paid $10 million for streetcars three years ago, but never laid any tracks for them to run on. Nor does it have any idea when it might have such tracks. So they remain in Plzen.

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“What’s up with groups that argue for less government but see publicly built highways as an expression of the free market?” asks Alex Marshall, a columnist for Governing Magazine, in what is both a cheap and unoriginal shot at some of the Antiplanner’s friends.

Marshall finds it “exceedingly strange that a group of conservative and libertarian-oriented think tanks — groups that argue for less government — have embraced highways and roads as a solution to traffic congestion and a general boon to living,” while they “attack mass-transit spending, particularly on trains.” Among these peculiar people Marshall names Wendell Cox, John Tierney, Bob Poole, and some guy named RandalO’Toole (Marshall doesn’t say whether that is a first or last name).

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Today is Earth Day. The Antiplanner remembers the first Earth Day in 1970, when it was called the National Environmental Teach-In. As a senior in high school in Portland, I had already started my first environmental group, whose pretentious and somewhat ominous name was the “Regional Environmental Research and Control Organization,” which we abbreviated to “ERC.”

Since ERC was already up and running, we had one of the largest environmental teach-ins at any Portland school. We brought in State Treasurer (and future governor) Bob Straub, City Commissioner (and future major) Neil Goldschmidt, City Commissioner (and also future mayor) Frank Ivancie, as well as representatives from state and regional water and air pollution agencies.

In 1970, when Portland photographer Ray Atkeson tried to take a photo like this, there was so much pollution that he had to stitch together a photo of Mt. Hood on top of a photo of the city. Now the mountain is visible from the city on any sunny day.
Flickr photo by RG Photo.

The environmental teach-in changed my life. Up to then, I wanted to become an architect. Instead, I decided to save the forests by going to forestry school and then to work for environmentalists, which is what I did.

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Michelle Obama has caught some flak over a recent statement she made in North Carolina: “The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.” This statement reflects a major difference in how two Americas — call them left and right — view the economy — call it pie.

As American as apple pie.

The left views the pie as fixed. If the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, the government should take some pie from the rich and give it to the poor.

The right views the pie as variable. If left to their own devices, private entrepreneurs will build wealth, making the pie bigger. If institutions are properly designed, eventually many people will get a share of that wealth. The left derisively calls this the “trickle-down theory.”

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The recent brouhaha about Barack Obama calling small-town Americans “bitter” brings up an issue Americans rarely talk about: class. Unlike Britain, America does not have an inherited aristocracy, and we like to think we are economically mobile, so we don’t think about class.

Certainly, we use terms like upper class, middle class, and lower class, but these are strictly economically defined, and since (we tell ourselves) we are economically mobile, the labels do not permanently stamp anyone as one thing or another.

But there is another term we sometimes use: working class. Perhaps because of my egalitarian American upbringing, this term puzzled me when I first encountered it. Most families have at least one worker, so how is the working class distinguished from any other class? Are working-class incomes higher or lower than middle-class incomes?

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