What does the dam tell us about the governments ability to do big things?
It was such a big job that no private concern could have done it by itself. It needed the government to oversee it. But there’s a downside to that. The people who most benefited from the dam also lost a large measure of local control of their own destinies because the federal government, to this day, plays a key role in managing the resources—mostly the water—that’s provided by the dam. This is something that was never anticipated. When the first ideas came up from [California’s] Imperial Valley to build a high dam on the Colorado, they thought it was going to secure and supply water that they would control. In fact, they lost control. That’s one of the real lessons of this. When you have the federal government coming in and playing such a key role in financing and designing and facilitating the construction of a major piece of infrastructure that has importance locally, regionally, and nationally, you’re not going to escape the influence of the federal government in managing that infr
