Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
Gabe, "Compeition" in the Green bill refers to head to head competition between railroads. As you know (or should know), each transport mode has it's own advantages and disadvantages in comparison to the others. As has been explained, the railroads niche is to move bulk commodities at speed. Barges move bulk commodities at a relative snail's pace, trucks move product at speed but not in bulk, pipelines only move one or two specific commodities, airlines move light select products at max speed, etc. Therefore, certain product groups will tend to gravitate toward one of the modes as it's main tranporter. When these product groups are subject to only one transporter within each mode, you get captive shippers and monopolistic characteristics. Since all other modes have intramodal competition, the only mode left within intramodal monopolistic power are the railroads. Thus, when you have a representative government that is charged with maintaining a competitive free market, you are bound to get this type of legislation when certain monopolistic actions take place. An easily understandable comparison is the antitrust action against Standard Oil. Using your logic, you can argue that Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly, because there were other forms of energy available for oil consumers. Coal was widely available at the time, I guess you can argue that coal was the competition against oil. But of course, that argument is flawed because the usage for oil is unique in transportation fuel consumption compared to coal. Oil had a niche, and Standard Oil had a monopoly on this niche. The antitrust action against Standard Oil was appropriate by the analysis of most historians and economists. Trucks can only be seen as an alternative of last resort to railroads, just as coal is only an alternative to oil if we start building steam cars again, e.g. an alternative of last resort. Maybe if oil runs out we'll see coal fired steam powered autos again, but until then if oil is available we sure do want it coming from a competitive array of providers, right? You seem to not want to comprehend the difference between the Green bill and the Burns bill. The Green bill is long overdue, the Burns bill is a regrettable attempt to return to the days to which you refer in the body of your post. It's pretty straight forward: Antitrust is good, reregulation is bad. Then of course you apparently misunderstand open access. Under most open access proposal, you pay as you go, and you don't own one set of tracks but use someone else's. Instead, you split rail companies into independent infrastructure and transporter companies, ergo no co-management of tracks and rolling stock (although I'm sure you could own stock in both entities). This socialist misconception of open access as a "taking" of property is laughable when you consider past antitrust actions against monopolists. Do you really consider the Standard Oil or AT&T split ups as a "taking" of private property? BTW, railroads are nowhere near to earning their cost of capital, and never will under the closed access system. Under the current system this goal is impossible, because to achieve it we'd have to kill our economy to pay for the comprehensive monopolistic rates required to achieve this cost of capital recovery in the first place. That's the Achilles Heel of Staggers - it made no realistic attempt to provide a competitive playing field to go along with the rate deregulation, thus creates monopolistic situations. It's half cocked, just like California's partial deregulation of their energy markets. If Staggers had been done correctly, we wouldn't even be discussing things such as antitrust potential against railroads, or the spector of reregulation of railroads. A free market economy simply cannot function under widespread monopolistic control of key markets, nor can it blossom under govnerment price controls.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag