The Associated Press reports that the President “is calling for a six-year, $53 billion spending plan for high-speed rail, as he seeks to use infrastructure spending to jumpstart job creation.” Whatever you make of the President’s intentions — whether they pivot on the purpose of spawning billions of dollars worth of contracts for politically-connected Big Business or on some altruistic desire to “get America back to work” — those pesky details of the policy must be dealt with.
53 billion dollars worth of jobs sounds like either a felicitously-timed piece of propagandist puffery or a miraculous gift from the heavens depending on your political viewpoint or, perhaps more accurately, depending on your orientation to empirical reality. Because if we’re really meant to believe that the economy is floundering just to pull its way up out of a serious recession, then we have to wonder where all these magical — and completely unaccountable — billions are coming from, where the state’s ability to create manna for the hungry derives from.
Along with these tiresome details, we may also puzzle over just where all of these new rail lines will go, a question apparently answered by the edict that the Department of Transportation will, reports Reuters, “choose corridors for new projects.” One can only guess what that morsel of circumlocution means, but we might postulate that it will translate into more Kelo-style land grabs for the Corporate Bosses.
Commenting on the fact that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (“fighting for your business”) is “a big fan of Obama’s push for infrastructure investment,” Tanya Snyder of Streets Blog had it right when she called such investment a “fruitcake” for Big Business. It may be worth noting, for the benefit of those who insist that the business lobby longs for untrammeled free markets, that the Chamber also hailed the President’s stimulus packages.
The reality of the grand plan for high-speed rail, packaged with all of its “helping hand for the worker” rhetoric, is very much at variance with the Vice President’s statement today. Although a meaningful transference of wealth will accompany this prodigious public works project, it’ll manifest as the same kind of regressive redistribution that the state’s intervention consistently creates. Billions will be siphoned from the average worker, and, sure, some will go card-punching, construction union wage-earners, but on balance the managers will reap the windfall of our contemporary patronage.
We should never be outwitted into believing that the state, sitting at the nucleus of the American corporate system, would ever do anything that wasn’t ultimate facilitating the Bosses’ Economy (and, therefore, against a real free market). Peter Kropotkin saw through the “endless discussions” of reform-minded “practical people” who dismissed anarchists as “Utopian dreamers.” He rightly scoffed at the middle-of-the-road apologists for the state who regarded “‘public works’ … as a means of giving food to the unemployed.”
Anarchists on the free market left likewise penetrate the opaque euphemisms of the state that cast corporate welfare as public-spirited populism, as some kind of impetus for positive change in the life of the common man. “Infrastructure” like the rail system is just that — the framework for a rigid, exploitative economy domineered by and enthralled to the interests of a small elite class.
And that economy bears no relation to a market freed from those interests, one composed of the freely-undertaken exchanges of individuals who approach one another on an equal footing. Even with all of their pretty words for “free enterprise,” it’s this latter kind of economy that the Chamber and the President stand in the way of.
Citations to this article:
- David D'Amato, All Aboard the Money Train, Carroll County, Maryland Standard, 02/11/11
- David D'Amato, All Aboard the Money Train, Genesis Communications Network, 02/09/11
Oh brother.
With everything going on in the world, rail is being attacked? Rail, which is potentially the most efficient and least harmful form of travel? I thing this article belongs at the "libertarian" blog AntiPlanner.
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That's right. No more middle-of-the-road apologists for the things Kropotkin despised: wage-labor, private property, etc. As he said, the "practical people" are unlikely to have asked the real questions: "What is to be done to provide these multitudes with bread?" But he knows that the answer is no patching-up of the old system: "the really practical course of action, in our view, would be that the people should take immediate possession of all the food of the insurgent districts…" So, clearly, taking Kropotkin's lead, the correct answer to the problem of transit is to take immediate possession of *all* the means of transportation in those districts where the needs of the poor are not being met.
But, first, we should probably seize that all that bread…
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53 billion USD? Isn't that the annual budget of the DHS? I think I know where we can get the money from…
haha! Great point, Todd
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I hear you loud and clear, Mr. Lempa! And point taken, but the state can even ruin good ideas like cleaner, more efficient transit! And don't worry; I'll be hitting on other happenings in the world too!
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Even from a statist standpoint, from which there is no problem in government subsidies to rail as such, spending money on high-speed rail is a horrible boondoggle. The main structural distortion in the American transportation, as a result of the disproportionate subsidies to trucks and highways over the past several decades, is a lack of freight rail capacity. A smart statist who wanted to subsidize rail effectively would spend the money eliminating the bottlenecks in freight capacity. I read an article a couple years ago claiming that $200 or $300 billion would be enough to expand capacity to shift some 80% of truck freight to rail. Not that I'd advocate that, but from the standpoint of a statist who wanted to encourage energy independence and hedge against Peak Oil it would at least make sense. Certainly a lot more sense than spending money on high-speed passenger rail for a yuppie market in a few marginal corridors.
The problem with David's article—aside from the hilarious misappropriation of revolutionary communist rhetoric to paint mere anti-statism as something other than middle-of-the-road in anarchist terms—is that high-speed rail (like Kropotkin's call for the seizure of bread) is just an occasion or excuse to say what we would expect him to say: the bad stuff (the state, statists, unfreed markets, and, apparently, messy discussion) is bad and the good stuff (freed markets, not discussing too much) is really, really good. He actually appears to think that high-speed rail is a "good idea"—to the extent that he thinks anything at all about it—but only in the comments, where it doesn't drag things off-message. In practical terms, I'm not sure who this article is going to appeal to: "freed markets" + Kropotkin seems like a combination suited mostly to preaching to a pretty small choir, some of whom will almost certainly be alienated by the more-or-less accidental hatin' on trains. But it's sufficiently dogma-heavy and fact-free that we know that he could, and probably would, have responded to a plan for "eliminating the bottlenecks in freight capacity" with exactly the same sort of broad-brush scorn—and seems aimed at an audience who has no preference, and no practical grounds for preference, between high-speed passenger rail, improved freight-rail capacity, and any other sort of government program.
You, on the other hand, have gone ahead and expressed some preferences. It isn't at all clear to me that "spending money on high-speed rail is a horrible boondoggle." As tentative a project as Amtrak's Acela has done pretty well, from a profit and loss perspective, despite a variety of dubious design choices and management practices. And I'm guessing that even my conventional Amtrak rides aren't nearly as heavily subsidized as my neighbors' automobile use. But what really baffles me about your response is how distant it is from the concerns of the sorts of individual citizens who have rallied around projects like high-speed rail. They're not trying to "undistort" a transportation market; they're trying to get to a Cubs game from Buffalo, or visit family in Detroit. And they live in a neoliberal world where it is already a whole lot more important that freight and capital be able to move freely than it is that they can get away for the weekend. Presumably, what people want, and think they see in all the high-speed rail associations popping up should get some attention in a "market anarchist" analysis of these issues. Of course, that takes us out of the simple realm of mere anti-statist rhetoric.
But if the impression I keep getting is that I'm a "statist" for thinking that—in the real-world here and now—there is a substantive difference between subsidizing efficient long-distance transit and the thousand and one more harmful boondoggles (both public and private) around me, "statism" doesn't sound much worse than abstract "free market anti-capitalism."
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I thought that the folks in the USA through their use of government subsidized roads and airports and airlines put passenger rail out of business? I guess those great financiers Obama and Biden along with their consulting group: The Department of Transportation are going to re-invigorate this lost business. But hey if they want to save fuel then instead of high speed rail (Currently trains running over 49.00000 mph) then they could use low speed rail and really save the environment.
But the article did not mention the best part: That is the great Biden wants all of the trains and equipment to be made right here in the USA. This is amusing because there are no high speed rail companies operating in the USA. But this is not an issue, it is a challenge. He, Biden, is going to lead in the waste of billions developing a business in the USA for no reason at all when there are perfectly good French companies and German and Italian and Japanese and others to do this job.
The French should right now be about to send us another Statue of Liberty. They are experts in all the expensive crap that these clowns in government want to throw at us. Here is the small list:
1. Nuclear power generation.
2. High Speed Rail.
3. Ultra-High Speed Rail.
4. Socialized Health Care.
5. Paying for overly expensive pension schemes for public employees.
6. Making alternative fueled vehicles.
7. Cell phones.-Nix that the folks there are in Norway…..
I thought that the folks in the USA through their use of government subsidized roads and airports and airlines put passenger rail out of business? I guess those great financiers Obama and Biden along with their consulting group: The Department of Transportation are going to re-invigorate this lost business. But hey if they want to save fuel then instead of high speed rail (Currently trains running over 49.00000 mph) then they could use low speed rail and really save the environment.
So basically, status quo ante rules all, because I'm supposed to feel sorry for people you describe in pitiful terms, who might be hurt, feelings I mean, if the train boondoggle isn't carried forward?
And yes, Shawn: you are indeed a statist, in that your argument is for continuation of the state and doesn't allow for other alternatives except by disdainful, scorned mention.
Well done, sir. Al Gore would be proud.
"So basically, status quo ante rules all…"
I think you're misinterpreting him.
"And yes, Shawn: you are indeed a statist, in that your argument is for continuation of the state and doesn't allow for other alternatives except by disdainful, scorned mention."
Yep. Definitely misinterpreting him. But I suppose you're not going to let me get in the way of the time-honored libertarian tradition of uncharitably assuming that anyone who disagrees with you must be a dirty, rotten statist.
Steam locomotives are locomotives with a steam engine that provides adhesion. Coal, petroleum, or wood is burned in a firebox. The heat boils water in the fire-tube boiler to create pressurized steam.
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