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Electrification. Good for freight RR`s ??

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[quote user="jeaton"]  In the US, the public pays for transportation either via taxation or in the price of goods and services with a transportation component, and that component is in just about everything we buy.  So what, pray tell is the benefit of either system from the point of money out of my pocket?    Further, if it can actually be shown that government has made more mistakes and wasted money in the transportation area, it, unlike private business, is not extracting a profit for its effort.  [/quote] It is true that while government imposes an added cost for the relatively high cost of its overhead, capitalism imposes an added cost of profit.  But are they really the same detriment?  Capitalism has financial risk, and profit is the reward for that risk.  If you take profit away from capitalism, there will be no capitalism.  Conversely, you could reduce the overhead of government without affecting the result of its business activity.   Moreover, I suspect that the high overhead of government, which is a fundamental result of bearing no actual financial risk, is larger than the profit taken by capitalism applied to the same task.  And then you have the fact that government socializes the cost of goods and services to people who have no need for them, while capitalism charges cost only to the recipients of goods and services.   So, in reference to your question about which system takes more money out of your pocket, my answer would be socialism.
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