Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote user="daveklepper"] I studied with Milton Friedman when I was an undergraduate at MIT 1949 - 1953 (one Semester economics course).   You are right, they arre not nonsense and are applicable to a wide variety of manufacturing, farming, and service industries.   They may have been applicable to transportation at one time, but the massive government interference that you object to already occured and it furthered highway and air transportation massively over rail transportation.  YOu will find NO reasonably sized developed country in the world that does not subsidize rail transportation, including passenger rail transportation to some extent today.     I am not a Socialist.   I am definitely in favor of free market capitalism where there is a level playing field.   But railroads, and particularly passenger railroading, does not have a level playing field.  The massive government capital investment in interstate highways and airports has already occured, and private capital expecting a decent return, did not make the investment.   Governments at vairous levels did that and are happy to get the bonds paid off or even just make operating costs. The kind of automation and advanced thinking that produced the machanical sorting of mail at major post offices could have just as well been applied to make railway post offices far more efficient, and the USA would have far better mail service today.   It really was the removal of the post office business that finally put passssenger train service into a money loosing tailspin.   The conversion to post office automation was a government investment. [/quote] Nothing that you have said means that some or all of the current approach could not be reversed to some extent.  In Texas new toll roads are being funded, at least in part, by private investors, some times with government incentives, with good outcomes. Moreover, there is nothing to say that some areas of the country could not or would not support privately funded passenger rail. Private developers probably could not afford to build the whole system.  But they might be able to pay their fair share of an existing railway, i.e. just as truckers, bus operators, etc. pay a share of the highways, which they argue is a fair share.  This is what the south Florida experiment is all about.  Well see how it goes. I spent most of my working life in the electric utility business. As one of the last bastions of regulated monopolies everyone said that industry could not be opened to competition. They were wrong.  It has been done in Texas and Australia as well as several other areas.  I was part of the driving force that brought it about in Texas. It was like pulling teeth. But we got it done.  What they do in other countries, especially European countries, may be the best fit for the problems facing those countries. Given the disastrous outcomes stemming from the European debt crisis, I hardly think that we want to emulate them. What they do in Australia, where I lived for more than five years, has been good for Australia. They may have some good practices there that we should consider, but at the end of the day we should craft solutions that fit our problems within the context of our culture.
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