America’s Monorail

Calendar July 15, 2009 | Posted by Michael S. Langston

Every time I hear about Amtrak receiving more money from the federal government, I’m  reminded of a Simpson episode where due to a fine the rich Mr. Burns paid for polluting the local water ways, they gathered at a town hall meeting to decide what to do with all that money.

While making the decision, the typical slick snake oil salesman, Lyle Lanley comes in and sells Springfield their very own solar powered monorail.  The quote I remember clearly is when the Lyle started his sales pitch with this gem:

Y’know, a town with money is like a mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!

& while it’s obvious to most people that we don’t have extra money to blow, we continue to spend like drunken sailors on the continuous budget drains like Amtrak.

In order to not be out done by Bush’s massive increase in Amtrak funding (here), Obama included billions (here) in the economic stimulus package.

Meanwhile, since President Nixon created Amtrak, its history is overflowing with budget deficits, mismanagement, and continuing a decreased percentage of passenger miles demonstrates thoroughly that this experiment has failed. Wiki has a great article on the history of Amtrak which helps explain various causes of rails decline.  Additionally, for the thoughtful environmentalist, Cato has a published report that generally more energy is used per passenger mile on rails than on other forms of transport (here).  Noting among other things:

Far from protecting the environment, most rail transit lines use more energy per passenger mile, and many generate more greenhouse gases, than the average passenger automobile. Rail transit provides no guarantee that a city will save energy or meet greenhouse gas targets.

Among those many others reasons why the Utopian vision of mass rails should go away, a glaring reason is the density of most of the American population.

While mass transit seems to work well in fairly dense areas, they do not work well in less dense areas.  Other forms of transportation, such as car and airline are valued more highly than train.  From a 2002 Cato article describing how Amtrak should be treated they noted:

To put this point in context, in 2000 Americans made only 22.5 million trips by Amtrak compared to 665 million on commercial airlines.

I’m just extremely happy the Buggy Whip Corporation of America isn’t still around.  I’d hate to see all the political money thrown its way in an attempt to save it.

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The Economic Downturn – Supporting Stupidity

Calendar May 17, 2009 | Posted by Michael S. Langston

While listening to the audio version of this Economist article, I learned about a recently new Facebook called 1,000,000 People Against the NYC MTA Fare Hike.  & over @ Reason, I learned about this article, written by a guy paid to write about economics, describing to his readers how his stupid decisions are not his fault.

This is almost too much stupidity for me to handle in a single day.  The audacity of FB posters and the economics writer believing with sincerity that tax payers should be helping them out is disgusting, bankrupt, and morally indefensible.

From Facebook:

Marc Silverman (New York, NY) wrote at 11:28am on May 11th, 2009

The MTA are a Bunch of Thieving MOFO’s!

SuetShan StreetCred (New York, NY) wrote at 3:34pm on May 14th, 2009

Give us a break! We cannot afford paying more. Can’t have rice and beans everyday either.

Wilson Fisk (Westchester, NY) wrote at 1:49am on May 15th, 2009

I’m in this group now too, so make it 1,000,001 people against the fare hikes. Now I know they’re gonna say this is just another mo-fo’ b*tching about the fare hikes ’cause he ain’t got nothing else better to do or because he’s cheap or because he’s just ain’t trying to pay more for his metro card and all of those are correct. However those aren’t the main reasons I joined this group. My uncle works for the MTA and he’s always talking about he’s under paid, the trains and busses always come on the craziest schedule ever, they’re always dirty as the projects staircases- the other day I had to sit next to a roach on the train– he was going to visit heis mother for mother’s day, she lived in queens. They’re gonna raise prices and cut services- I hear, I mean WTF!!! What the hell do they do with all the CREAM they don’t pay the workers top dollar for thier services, they don’t pay for extra workers to help clean the busses, trains, stations and to give us more service. It’s like WTF!!!

Angelica Valle (Baltimore, MD) wrote at 11:44am

I had to leave Ny because I couldn’t afford the $2 fare hike. Now I can’t even move back if the fare goes up to $3…wtf.. I mean I could scrape up $4 but six its ridiculous!! I could pay it but why should I have to!!!

Muneeb Aleem Qureshi (CUNY Hunter) wrote at 2:11pm yesterday

WTF is wrong with MTA?, i mean i can afford to pay that much but I feel bad for those people who can’t, their screwed

Charles Lenchner (New York, NY) wrote at 4:22pm on May 14th, 2009

Please help us do something about the crazy rents going up all the time! http://apps.facebook.com/c auses/283193. Support stronger rent laws that protect affordable housing and prevent rents from going up faster than anything else….

Then over @ The New York Times Magazine, I read crap like this:

…The only problem was money. Having separated from my wife of 21 years, who had physical custody of our sons, I was handing over $4,000 a month in alimony and child-support payments. That left me with take-home pay of $2,777, barely enough to make ends meet in a one-bedroom rental apartment. Patty had yet to even look for a job. At any other time in history, the idea of someone like me borrowing more than $400,000 would have seemed insane.

But this was unlike any other time in history. My real estate agent gave me the number of Bob Andrews, a loan officer at American Home Mortgage Corporation.

The idea that my tax dollars could potentially go to subsidize these people is infuriating, but what’s even worse is that these people apparently believe they are owed that help in some way.

They apparently all believe tax payers should pay them to help get them to work at a job they choose or that tax payers should help pay mortgage for a house they freely bought or believe they should be allowed to control the rent on private property in a city they choose to live in…

Regardless of what they think their intent is, the fact is, by their very actions, they display a philosophy of self obsession without moral reasoning.  They seem to believe strongly that the money we use to buy food for our families, to pay our rent, to pay for our transportation – should be reduced to help them fix situations they freely entered into.

If you want to know why and how we got here – I say look no further than this obvious a lack of morals and to their obvious obliviousness to it.

Now while it is true that this lack of morals isn’t some monopoly held by only these people, but alas it is shared by business leaders, union leaders, politicians and many others.  But they all deserve our scorn, contempt, and an education they pay for, not tax payer money to support their bad decisions.

It’s as if they all need to be sat down and told, “Money doesn’t grow on trees” like a three year old who can’t understand that money is limited.  It’s staggering.

As John Galt stated in Any Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged:

I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

I think I now understand why some people can become so cynical.  I’m still going to believe in the overall goodness of most people, but slowly but surely I find the percentage of good people I think exists is much smaller than I’m willing to admit.

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