No, I’m not accusing Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, Harvard president and economic adviser to President Obama of plagiarism; not at all. I am only saying that he has noticed, in his quotidian life, some of the same things I’ve noticed in mine, and has the same reaction. Which is that American government, and American companies acting as subcontractors to government, aren’t performing as well as they used to. They can’t seem to accomplish simple tasks which their counterparts in our youths excelled at. Or, as I put it in a Washington Examiner column earlier this year, gummint don’t work good.

Summers’ article in the Washington Post cited the months-long repair work on an escalator in the US Airways shuttle terminal in LaGuardia, which Summers undoubtedly encounters on his undoubtedly frequent trips from Boston to New York; I can imagine him picking up his carry-on bag and schlepping it down the escalator and staircase rather than have it effortlessly travel behind him as it would on a working escalator. His other complaint is about the seemingly endless repair of the Larz Anderson Bridge crossing the Charles River where it is, as he notes, 100 yards wide, between Harvard’s main campus in Cambridge and the Business School and other university buildings in the Allston neighborhood of Boston. Summers notes that Gen. George S. Patton took a day to construct a bridge capable of carrying tanks across the much broader Rhine in 1945 and that it is scheduled to take almost half as long to repair the LaGuardia escalator as it took to construct the Empire State Building in 1930.