Around the country, cities are going ahead with trolley and streetcar projects, as well as light rail. I just returned from Seattle. Capitol Hill was torn apart at huge expense — all to add a streetcar line to cover a stretch where no buses now run.
Trains are cool; trolleys are neat; streetcars have cachet. But as transportation economist and city-planning critic Randal O’Toole puts it, these are all more costly than buses. Far more costly. They rack up huge costs in infrastructure, and the ridership for them rarely increases enough to pay off even maintenance costs much less the capital outlays.
But for real transportation insanity, California’s your place. There, the bullet-train project has spiraled out of control, “forcing” the state’s pixillated pols to court the state’s employee pension funds to “invest” in their beloved boondoggle.
Why this madness? What’s going on here?
I think Thorstein Veblen explained it. Inadvertently.
Veblen was the economist of our great-grandfathers’ generation who characterized capitalism’s failures as the wastefulness of the rich, in terms of “conspicuous consumption.” He thought that there should be more government, and that this would be . . . less wasteful.
Well, we got that “more government.” It’s far more wasteful than the billionaires of old. At least they got rich providing benefits for the masses. Today, governments tax the masses to pay for vast, inefficient schemes to . . . move the masses. And the masses stay away. In droves.
The “conspicuous consumption” is in the public realm.
It turns out that spending other people’s money makes folks in government less responsible and more enticed by technological gewgaws and the strange tides of high-cost fashion.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in cur ious possibilities. I mean the advertisement…. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.
Every constitution…, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years [a generation]. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.
Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.