More Doubling Down On Failure
Obama Administration 
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One of the great things about being in government is that when you’re mapping out a taxpayer-funded program, you never need to concern yourself with piddling things like economic viability. Thus we have the spectre of President Obama unveiling a $13 billion high-speed rail proposal despite the fact that the existing government train service, Amtrak, is an unprofitable fiscal rathole into which the government is currently stuffing about $1.3 billion annually.
As Bruce McQuain points out, this is not a sound business plan which constitutes a wise investment of taxpayer dollars. Rather, it’s a social engineering plan that imagines the principal obstacle to widespread embrace of passenger rail transporation in the United States (and the realization of public benefits that will allegedly flow from that embrace) is a simple lack of supply. If this weren’t a faith-based initiative we’d already have private-sector entrepreneurs trying to make a buck at it. And as invarably happens when communitarian good intentions hull on the reefs of market reality — when the rail system fails to attract sufficient passengers to cover its operating costs, and when the promised public benefits fail to materialize — the response will be that clearly we haven’t spend lavishly enough, and must throw yet more money at the (totally predictable) “problem.” At no point will an actual grown-up stop and say, “Maybe businesspeople, who would actually be risking their own capital to invest in this sort of thing, know something that we in government don’t.”
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