Entrepreneurs built our roads, rails and canals far better than government did

See Obama's False History of Public Investment By LARRY SCHWEIKART JR. AND BURTON W. FOLSOM JR. From today's WSJ. Mr. Schweikart, a history professor at the University of Dayton, is the co-author, with Dave Dougherty, of "A Patriot's History of the Modern World" (Sentinel, 2012). Mr. Folsom, a history professor at Hillsdale College, is the co-author, with his wife, Anita, of "FDR Goes to War" (Threshold, 2011). Excerpts:

"Create the infrastructure, in other words, and the jobs will come.

History says it doesn't work like that. Henry Ford and dozens of other auto makers put a car in almost every garage decades before the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956. The success of the car created a demand for roads."

"... the makers of autos, tires and headlights began building roads privately long before any state or the federal government got involved. The Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway for cars, pieced together from new and existing roads in 1913, was conceived and partly built by entrepreneurs..."

"Before the 1860s, almost all railroads were privately financed and built."

"When the federal government decided to do infrastructure in the 1860s, and build the transcontinental railroads (or "intercontinental railroad," as Mr. Obama called it in 2011), the laying of track followed the huge and successful private investments in railroads.

In fact, when the government built the transcontinentals, they were politically corrupt and often—especially in the case of the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific—went broke. One cause of the failure: Track was laid ahead of settlements. Mr. Obama wants to do something similar with high-speed rail. The Great Northern Railroad, privately built by Canadian immigrant James J. Hill, was the only transcontinental to be consistently profitable. It was also the only transcontinental to receive no federal aid."

"...Pan American World Airways, began flying passengers overseas by the mid-1930s. During that period, nearly all airports were privately funded..."

"Public airports did not appear in large numbers until military airfields were converted after World War II."

"Most state-supported canals lost money, and Pennsylvania in 1857 and Ohio in 1861 finally sold their canal systems to private owners."

"In all of these examples, building infrastructure was never the engine of growth, but rather a lagging indicator of growth that had already occurred in the private sector."