ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION?

Gulliver of The Economist finds a Freakonomics panel discussion on Amtrak.  He suggests that analysts place too much emphasis on farebox recovery.

Here are some better questions: what's the right balance of public- and private-sector involvement in these sorts of enterprises? How much, if anything, should governments continue to invest in air, rail and road infrastructure? If the government is going to invest in infrastructure (rather than simply let the market decide), what is the right balance of spending between those different modes of travel? And how much should the environmental consequences of various modes of travel be taken into account when making these decisions?

Freakonomics's panellists, to their credit, explored some of these questions in their answers. But framing the discussion around a weird notion of "profitability" isn't particularly helpful. Here's a good rule of thumb: if a government entity's profitability is the main thing you're worried about, it probably shouldn't be a government entity. Nobody worries about the military or the courts being "profitable". It's probably not the right question about Amtrak, either.

True enough. As long as we're considering dimensions other than farebox recovery, shall we discuss the extent to which highway construction, including urban renewal for freeways, serves either as a regressive transfer or as corporate welfare?