The career of Robert Moses: city planning as a microcosm of socialism.

• Author: Callahan, Gene
• Position: Cameo

Robert Moses was the dominant figure in shaping the built environment of New York City and New York State for more than three decades, from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s. Mayors and governors feared to defy him. The public works that he was responsible for creating include Shea Stadium, the World's Fair Grounds in Queens, Jones Beach, the Triborough Bridge, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the United Nations Headquarters, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Bruckner Expressway, the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Long Island Expressway, the Robert Moses Power Dam at Niagra, the Robert Moses Power Dam at Massena, the Grand Central Parkway, the Southern State Parkway, the Northern State Parkway, Downing Stadium, Astoria Pool, the Major Deegan Expressway, the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, Orchard Beach, the Throgs Neck Bridge, the Cross Bay Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, and numerous other roads, playgrounds, parks, and housing projects. (1) Moses exerted all of this public influence even though he never held an elective office.

Although Moses always portrayed himself and was often portrayed by others as acting in the public interest, the history of his career illustrates his growing self-absorption; his concern with his own vision, whatever impact its realization might have on others; and his love of power for its own sake. In fact, we contend, Moses's career presents a microcosm of the "fatal conceit" of socialism (Hayek 1988).

The Errors of Constructivism

Early in his career, Moses was an ardent reformer who sincerely believed that he could rationally restructure society for human betterment. Although even in his college days a hint of the later Machiavellian Moses showed itself, (2) it seems clear that principle generally stood high above expediency as he launched his attempts to reform government and society.

However, even as a sincere reformer, Moses held ideas that reflected socialism's fatal conceit: the notion that because society is the result of human activity, humans therefore can restructure society in whatever fashion pleases them. F. A. Hayek calls this belief constructivism, or "the idea that the ability to acquire skills stems from reason" (1988, 21). Of course, because reasoning is itself a human skill, the ability to reason cannot be a prerequisite of the ability to acquire skills.

Constructivism presumes that civilization is the product of a thought-out plan (Hayek 1978, 6). According to Hayek, however, human reason always operates in the context of social institutions, norms, rules, and customs that we acquire from contact with other people and that enable us to think about and plan rationally for the future. Although our actions can influence such social entities, they are at the same time highly dependent on them. Therefore, human reason did not and could not precede civilization; rather, the two evolved together (1978, 3). Civilization could not have arisen as a planned achievement. Instead, it is a spontaneous order: the result of human action but not of human design (Hayek 1967, 96).

Moses's constructivism appeared early in his public life--for example, in his scheme devised between 1914 and 1915 to "rationalize" New York City's civil service. Moses wanted "all traces of the old ... washed away" to be replaced by a "completely new" and "all-embracing" system (Caro 1975, 75). He hoped to measure the performance of city workers on an objective numerical scale:

All government service, he said, could be divided into sixteen categories: executive, legislative, judicial, professional, subprofessional, educational, investigational, inspectional, clerical, custodial, street cleaning, (3) fire, police, institutional, skilled trades, and labor.... Each job could be scientifically analyzed to show its "functions" and "responsibilities." Each function and responsibility--and there were dozens of them for most jobs--could be given a precise mathematical weight corresponding to its importance in the over-all job. And the success of the employee in each function and responsibility could be given a precise mathematical grade. These grades would, added together according to weight and combined in service records for each employee, "furnish conclusions expressed in arithmetical ... terms." (Caro 1975, 75)

Moses's scheme relied on the existence of an objective measure by which one gauged the value of workers' contributions to "the social good." Decades before Moses proposed this plan, however, Carl Menger, a pioneer in the postclassical theory of value and the founder of the Austrian school of economics, had debunked the idea of objective values. Since Menger, economic theory has taught that value is not inherent in a good, but rather the result of the subjective significance that an agent attaches to it (1994, 116).

Moses's attempt to calculate "objectively" the value of city workers' contributions is closely analogous to the socialists' attempt to compute value in the absence of market prices. As Ludwig von Mises, a giant of the Austrian school, pointed out, rational economic calculation depends on money prices that reflect buyers and sellers' subjective...