From the WSJ Opinion Archives
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Sights Unseen
It shouldn't surprise us that nothing is rising from the World Trade Center site.
French billionaire Francois Pinault announced this week that, fed up with delays and bureaucratic hassles, he was calling off a project to build a $190 million art museum near Paris to house his collection of modern art. He will instead install the paintings in an 18th-century palazzo in Venice. France will be the poorer for it, both because of the cultural loss and the loss of investment that will now not be made in rehabilitating the site--a derelict Renault factory on an island in the Seine.
Americans frustrated by the delay in rebuilding at the World Trade Center site in New York cannot consider a move elsewhere. But the culprits here have many of the same characteristics--and are having some of the same effects--as the bureaucrats who sank Mr. Pinault's French museum project.
This is not the place to argue over the iconic "Freedom Tower" championed by New York Gov. George Pataki. At this point, we suspect, many people would be relieved to see anything rising from the ground at the WTC site. Instead, 44 months after the terrorist attacks, the design that took Gov. Pataki, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and officials of the Port Authority and Ground Zero development agency so long to see through and approve is on hold for now because of security concerns.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs, tired of battling politicians and bureaucrats, has abandoned plans to erect its own symbolic building on the edge of the site. Free, like Mr. Pinault, to take its resources elsewhere, the company says that it plans to look in Midtown.
Both tales put us in mind of Frederic Bastiat. The great 19th-century French economist was fond of observing that often the most salient facts are those you can't see. In a Journal op-ed on the 200th anniversary of Bastiat's birth, Bob McTeer, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, explained the unseen with one of Bastiat's famous examples: An observer might note that when a vandal breaks a bakery window, the baker hires a glazier to fix it, and he in turn spends his pay on something else, and so on. Thus, according to the fallacy, the vandal actually generates economic activity. What isn't seen is what the baker didn't spend his money on because he had to repair his window--a bigger kitchen, another store, what-have-you.
Bureaucrats and their red tape often play the vandal in the modern world, silently stifling what might have been and leaving no evidence of what's lost. In both Paris and New York, it seems, arrogance and egos are also part of the toxic mix.
In Mr. Pinault's case, what won't be seen in France, beyond the art, is the investment and economic development that might have flowed into a derelict area. For the foreseeable future, those things, and the jobs they bring, will not be seen at the WTC site either.
Also missing there--and this may be the sorriest consequence of all--will be concrete signs of the ingenuity, enthusiasm and resilience of the American people. Every day that the pit remains empty, those attributes will be invisible.
