The Obama Boondoggle Express - railroading us with railroads

News & Commentary from the liberterrain...

  OMG! Will taxpayer financed high speed rail be operated by Amtrak,
  the same mentality that managed FEMA during Katrina? (Artist's
  rendering of Amtrak's high-speed 'Acela' train. AP photo/Amtrak)

As reported in The New York Times and virtually every other media outlet on the planet, President Obama is taking his 8 billion State of the Union job-creation stimulus bucks on the road.

Railroad, that is.

Specifically, he wants to build high-speed rail in 13 major corridors across the country, including a 220-mile-per-hour bullet train in California and a pokey 168 mph Tampa to Orland run in Florida.

In case you think this politically motivated bank-busting grandiose "vision thing" is a swell idea, here are a few libertarian-eye-view reasons why it isn't.

1. It requires coercion in the form of taxes. Generations of taxpayers will be sucked dry paying for the choo-choos.

2. It requires coercion in the form of eminent domain, a euphemism for the government stealing land from the very citizens it should be protecting from theft.

3. It's a gigantic waste of money because government can do nothing without funneling millions of taxpayer takings into the pockets of their bureaucrat buddies yapping pompously on commissions, committees, boards, panels, agencies, task forces, etc., etc., etc.

4. Every job possible will be filled by union workers, making every aspect of every project more expensive.

5. It won't create any new jobs; it will merely create different jobs. The money from profits that millions of business operators would have used to expand their businesses, thereby creating new jobs and hiring more employees, will instead be siphoned off by politicians to create their own pet projects. There is no economic theory that says the same dollar can be spent in two different places simultaneously.

6. None of these railways will ever become self-sustaining. Otherwise, private enterprise would have already built them.

Private Financing 101:

Privately funded turnpikes, canals and railroads thrived in the early part of nineteenth century America. "Governments at all levels did intervene, however, with subsidies for canals, roads, and railroads, and their record of performance was nothing less than monstrous." (Mises.org, pdf)

James J. Hill built the Great Northern Railroad from St. Paul, Minnesota to Seattle, Washington, "the first transcontinental built without public money and just a few land grants and was one of the few transcontinental railroads not to go bankrupt." (Wikipedia)

The Channel Tunnel (Chunnel) that connects England and France under the English Channel with two rail lines was privately financed.

James J. Hill was a railroad builder. Barack H. Obama is a railroader.