You can always tell when you've scored a point off Tom...

But I think your point's interesting enough to not blow it off. Conservative rhetoric loves to portray the Conservative Movement as if it's existed since the founding of the Republic...indeed, Conservatives would have you believe that they founded America...and thus whatever Conservatives say carries the weight of tradition and heritage and so on.

But in reality the Conservative Movement is a new and radical development. Disorganized disaffection began in the 1920s during a wave of immigration that threatened the existing "white protestant nation" (title of a rather dull history of the Conservative Movement). The CM really established itself after World War II with the creation of a formal ideology by conservative intellectuals like Leo Strauss and the Kristols et al.

My dad (you remember, Atilla the Republican) tells of attending indoctrination meetings in the late 1940s after getting out of the Navy. There he was educated on the axis of evil linking Soviet Communism and American Liberalism, and he never looked back. Conservatism isn't natural for most people, and they need some pretty heavy indoctrination to really buy into it.

So, given that the Conservative Movement wasn't around in the early days of America, and didn't have a chance to weigh in on what today we'd call infrastructure investment, you pose an interesting alternate history question. Had there been Conservatives in the early 1800s as we know them today, would they have succeeded in blocking national infrastructure investments like schools and libraries and farm bureaus and canals and roads ad infitum? Could America have survived the attempt to strangle it at birth?

Enquring minds do want to know.

(Afterthought: I'm aware that America tried such Libertarian notions as toll roads and canals during the early 1800s. Notice that we've pretty much abandoned those ideas after giving them a try? Only if you're ignorant of history can you believe that Conservative ideas have never been given a fair trial.)