Trump Announces Military Features for Planned Triumphal Arch Near Washington
A Triumphal Arch Is a Dear Place to Store Ammunition
When a government hides a barracks inside a monument, it taxes both the treasury and the virtue it pretends to celebrate.
A vast triumphal arch, we are told, is to rise by the Potomac, bridging the capital and its neighbour, and within this architectural boast there is now to be lodged a “top grade military complex,” able to store arms and unleash snipers and drones. The declared purpose is national security; the form is a monument; the substance is a magazine and redoubt. It is a curious contrivance: the symbols of victory built first, the victories themselves left for later. I have no objection to arsenals as such, nor to walls thick enough to resist an enemy; but when the arsenal masquerades as a temple of glory, the impartial spectator begins to count the cost in coin and in character.
In my Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I assigned to the sovereign three duties: the defence of society, the administration of justice, and certain public works which no private undertaker could profitably provide. A complex for storing arms, if truly needful to defend the people, clearly falls within the first of these. The question, therefore, is not whether a nation may maintain magazines and vantage points, but whether a colossal arch, in that particular place and of that particular splendour, is the least burdensome and most effectual means of doing so. Defence is indispensable; display is optional; and the two are too often shuffled together at the public expense.
Whenever government undertakes some magnificent project, the benefits stand in the sun while the burdens lurk in the shade. The promised advantage here is visible and concentrated: a dramatic symbol of power, a fortified storehouse beside the capital, a perch for those snipers and drones whose very mention is meant to awe. The costs, by contrast, are dispersed and silent: taxpayers paying more or enjoying less, other needed works postponed, private industry diverted from profitable employments to raise a stone giant no merchant would build on his own account. The annual produce of the land and labour is what feeds the labouring poor; whatever is taken from that fund to ornament the greatness of the few deserves a very strict audit.
Nor does this arch seem devised to widen the market or improve the division of labour. Bridges, roads, and harbours enlarge the field within which the higgling and bargaining of the market can proceed, and so give rise to new arts, new trades, and higher wages. A triumphal arch of this military sort, placed by a national cemetery and bristling with weaponry, invites no caravans, shelters no commerce, and creates no new channel for peaceful industry. The masons and engineers will be employed for a season; but when their scaffolds come down, what remains is not an instrument of trade, but a stone consumer of future maintenance, attended by soldiers whose labour, though honourable and sometimes necessary, produces nothing that can be sold.
Some will say that in disturbed times, any additional fortification near the seat of government is cheap at almost any price. This plea has weight, and in The Theory of Moral Sentiments I observed that the impartial spectator enters, with some indulgence, into the fears of those who bear the responsibility of rule. Yet he will also ask whether the same security could not be obtained by modest and less ostentatious means: by well-situated depots, by prudent intelligence, by discipline rather than pageantry. To store ammunition in an arch is rather like keeping one’s savings in a gilded chest on the street: it may indeed be a chest, but the ornament is paid for in vanity and risk.
The manner in which such schemes arise should further sharpen our suspicion. Here, the alteration of design—from mere monument to armed complex—is announced from on high, justified in general terms of “national security,” and surrounded by reports of other sumptuous alterations in the capital’s aspect. When the powerful redesign the city that flatters them, with ballrooms, gilded offices, and now a martial arch, they spend not their own but other people’s money. I noted long ago that people of the same trade seldom meet, even for merriment, without contriving something against the public; the trade of power is no exception, and its favourite contrivance is to dress interest in the costume of patriotism.
Behind all stands the familiar figure I once called the man of system, bewitched by the supposed beauty of his own design, arranging the great chess-board of human society from above, and forgetting that every piece has a principle of motion of its own. A capital, in his imagination, must be remade at a stroke, its vistas aligned, its monuments enlarged, its citizens instructed in awe by stone and gilding. Yet true security is less theatrical: it lies in steady justice, in the confidence of the labouring poor that their earnings are safe from arbitrary exactions, and in public works whose utility is so plain that they require no triumphal arch to announce it. A free people ought to fear enemies, foreign and domestic, but they ought most of all to fear grand projects that consume their substance while flattering their rulers’ eye.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The sovereign's three duties (defence, exact administration of justice, and public works and institutions) and the four maxims of taxation: equality, certainty, convenience, economy.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — Trace every policy to its effect on prices, wages, and entry, and identify the hidden payer before pronouncing judgment.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Judge conduct by the impartial spectator: what would a well-informed, disinterested observer feel about this action? Praise-worthiness matters more than praise.