GIVE US A BETTER SOCIALIST EXAMPLE FIRST.

Some railroad workers, and their willing accomplices in the commentariat, think a change in ownership of the freight railroads would put an end to the rash of derailments and service meltdowns that have been depressingly common of late.  "Much of the transportation infrastructure in the United States, including the interstate highway system, is publicly owned."  Yes, and that's the way the infrastructure crumbles.  But if your priors are tight enough, you pay no attention to reality.

"On-time performance is in the toilet, shipper complaints are at all-time highs. Passenger trains are chronically late, commuter services are threatened, and the rail industry is hostile to practically any passenger train expansion. The workforce has been decimated, as jobs have been eliminated, consolidated, and contracted out, ushering in a new previously unheard-of era where workers can neither be recruited nor retained. Locomotive, rail car, and infrastructure maintenance has been cut back. Health and safety has been put at risk. Morale is at an all-time low. The ongoing debacle in national contract bargaining sees the carriers—after decades of record profits and record low operating ratios—refusing to make even the slightest concessions to the workers who ... have made them their riches."

Liquidating a company doesn't sound like the best way to produce long-term shareholder value, but, then, the shortsightedness of mutual fund managers or takeover artists is nothing new, nor is it something that some sort of governmental action can fix.  That the Commuter Rail authorities are government agencies, as is Amtrak, and they have trouble playing nice with the freight railroads is nothing new.  But where there is government failure already, is adding more government going to fix things?

Much of the transportation infrastructure in the United States, including the interstate highway system, is publicly owned. And the railroads were themselves under federal government control during World War I. When the war ended, rail workers and their unions pushed to keep the industry publicly owned. Eugene Victor Debs, a veteran railroad union leader, campaigned on the issue in his 1920 Socialist Party presidential bid. Many progressives, especially in farm country, agreed. But the government handed the railroads back to their wealthy owners and the issue died down—until the Great Depression devastated rural America.

In 1933, Joseph Bartlett Eastman, a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, was nominated by President Franklin Roosevelt to serve as Federal Coordinator of Transportation. The following year, Eastman wrote: "Theoretically and logically public ownership and operation meets the known ills of the present situation better than any other remedy. Public regulation of a privately owned and operated industry, reaching deeply into such matters as rates, service, capitalization, accounting, extensions and abandonments, mergers and consolidations, is a hybrid arrangement. When an industry becomes so public in character that such intimate regulation of its affairs becomes necessary, in strict logic it would seem that it should cease to masquerade as a private industry and the government should assume complete responsibility, financial and otherwise."

Eastman's ideas appealed to organized labor. Rail union heads called in 1935 for "the immediate taking over of the railways of the United States by the federal government and the creation of agencies within the federal government to manage and operate the railways."

William Green, who was then the American Federation of Labor president, told his group's convention: "It seems to me that the railroads are headed for government ownership. I do not see where we can find any other remedy. The only way the railroads can be saved, the interest of the workers maintained, and service be kept up for the good of the country is through government ownership."

Curiously, although none of that nationalization took place, other transportation scholars and policy experts of the era suggested there were too many railroad companies (if the phrase "wasteful and duplicative competition" comes to mind, dear reader, you may remain after class and help clean the erasers) and that perhaps two to four large regional or national rail carriers would ultimately be the result.

Although the column recites a great deal of Depression era history, it fails to note that one of the immediate effects of Amtrak relieving the freight railroads of their intercity passenger trains was the discontinuance of many trains, and the subsequent abandonment of rights-of-way that a current generation of Passenger Rail advocates would like back.  Then came Conrail, which was nationalization of the bankrupt carriers of the Official Region, and again, that involved a removal of supposedly wasteful and duplicative lines, many of which the freight railroad operators, or those current Passenger Rail advocates would like back.

If that's not enough, the column also neglected any mention of another publicly owned component of the transportation infrastructure, namely the air traffic control system.  Which is to say, a paradigm of government failure.  Do we really think that adding more infrastructure for future drafters of porkulus appropriations to attempt to patch together is going to somehow improve freight delivery?  Never mind that I have fantasies of being the commissar of all transportation under a nationalized regime.  My first act would be to require special movement permits for any trailer longer than thirty feet.  Somehow I haven't even gotten to the Mississippi River locks and dams, speaking of crumbling infrastructure.

Contemporary management fads might have made the freight railroads less efficient, but somehow a restoration of century-old political fads doesn't strike me as providing a fix.