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Greyhounds: I completely agree with you on the broad principle. While government intervention into the market is often touted as a broad benefit to the public, in reality it's usually an intentional wealth transfer from one set of pockets to another set of pockets. If I'm wrong about that, than all those lobbyists in D.C. are figments of our imaginations! But the real world is messy and complicated, and I think history shows that a policy of 100% hands-off markets is as unproductive as a policy of 100% hands-on markets. Even the military, which some think is a markets-free institution, plays a huge role in markets. The causes of World War II were not divorced from market access and market control, e.g., Japan thought it should have its own economic colonies, too. And the free market, while it will impartially allocate resources, will not always deliver the results the owners of the market (us) desire. I don't know about you, but my goal in life is not to die comforted by the satisfaction that hey, we're all as poor as church mice, but we saved the free market. The free market is a good tool to that end: I defend it so we can use it, but only if it brings us benefits. If an alternative tool brings us more benefits, it would be rather strange to resist using that tool. After all, if we had left it up to an unregulated free market to decide the fate of North America, it would all still be a colony of Great Britain, France, Spain, and Russia, and a rather undeveloped and ruined one, too. The market would ALWAYS reward the immediate benefit of remaining a colony, and puni***he unknown and over-the-horizon benefit of independence. The patriots who declared independence were the biggest offenders of an unregulated market in this country's history. They had no idea if it would all work out. The very same philosophy is used by the government to loan money to build a transcontinental railroad rather than waiting for capital markets to take that risk -- a bet that it would all work out later. Is the CREATE project any different? I think the argument between us can be clarified to a question of where to draw the line on government intervention into the allocation of transportation resources, the regulation of transportation charges, the regulation of transportation safety, and the adjudication of transportation disputes. But we already have the government deeply entangled into transportation, and while I respect your desire to not further that entanglement, it only serves ideological ends, not practical ends, to simply stand aside on something like the CREATE project while simultaneously ignoring the existence of all the other transportation involvements. This is not an argument for "modal fairness" but an argument for practical outcomes, in this case, an outcome that I believe will enrich all consumers with reasonable impartiality. I fall on the side of pragmatism. My concession to you -- one that I think not a lot of people are willing to make -- is that future government involvement in transportation should be entertained only as one-time projects for narrow and limited ends. Open-ended programs, which we frequently see as prescriptions for "modal fairness," are the other side of the coin: they also serve ideological ends, not pragmatic ends. If you look back, I think you'll find that the question of whether railroads should be economically regulated was never resolved one way or the other. The issues that created regulation simply became moot. We did not deregulate because those on the side of deregulation finally won the field, but because we woke up one morning and realized that those on the side of regulation had abandoned the field. OS
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