Alternatively, nationalize the rail lines and make UP pay for access. Privatization of critical infrastructure, historically, leads to poor outcomes with profits getting siphoned off in the process.
Rail workers aren’t getting sick days and trains are longer (leading to delays) because of investors squeezing rail infra and those who operate it. Why allow it to continue? The whole “privatizing profits socializing losses and externalities” is getting old, no?
You don't even need to nationalize it. It makes perfect sense for the federal government, or even a large state like California, to simply buy it on the open market, as a hostile takeover. The UPRR is dirt cheap compared to how much it is costing society for the UPRR to exist. We're talking low tens of billions. If the Obama administration had funded a takeover of the UPRR ten years ago it would have slashed the future costs of the Calif. High Speed Rail project.
In a pretty straight-forward way. All their insane demands about how far everything has to be from their rights of way in California's Central Valley is bloating up the cost of the passenger rail project. Ordinary road crossings, instead of having normal dimensions, are all 26 feet above the tops of the rails and have 100 foot clear spans. The "intrusion barrier"—a huge wall between adjacent freight and passenger tracks—is unprecedented anywhere in the world, even in places with shared corridors like France, Germany, and Sweden, and it costs an absolute fortune. Imagine a wall hundreds of miles long and strong enough to deflect a train.
That's on top of the other things that UPRR does, like preventing any semblance of reasonable service between the Bay Area and Sacramento.
My proposal is quite simple. Spin off virtually all of the UPRR into a new operating company with the same name and almost all of the capital assets, but retain the rights of way under Not A Bunch Of Dicks Track Corporation.
> Government support, most especially the detailing of officers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – the nation's only repository of civil engineering expertise – was crucial in assisting private enterprise in building nearly all the country's railroads. Army Engineer officers surveyed and selected routes, planned, designed, and constructed rights-of-way, track, and structures, and introduced the Army's system of reports and accountability to the railroad companies. More than one in ten of the 1,058 graduates from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point between 1802 and 1866 became corporate presidents, chief engineers, treasurers, superintendents and general managers of railroad companies. Among the Army officers who thus assisted the building and managing of the first American railroads were Stephen Harriman Long, George Washington Whistler, and Herman Haupt.
> State governments granted charters that created the business corporation and gave a limited right of eminent domain, allowing the railroad to buy needed land, even if the owner objected.
Currently the US trades dollars for real goods. One of the major uses of those dollars, since we don't export nearly enough goods to run balanced trade, is to buy US assets. Do you think that maybe our trade partners will stop accepting those dollars if we start nationalizing companies? At that point, doesn't it seem like maybe the USD will crumble?
Nah, never happens. Where will they go? The yuan? The euro? The ruble? Dysfunctional emerging markets? Being a global reserve currency is as, if not more powerful than, a DoD branch. Lot of capital available to burn, pun intended. Investors still invest in Greece and Italy, for example, and they’ve done far worse economically speaking.
Important to keep in mind this exposure is graded on a curve. You don’t have to be the fastest when the bear is chasing you, just faster than your slowest friend.
Reading my earlier comment, it's too black and white. It'd be another straw. Is it the one that breaks the back? I have no idea. But I don't think it's wise to start nationalizing companies.
If trust in foreign currency holdings declines (say, if we decide to unilaterally cancel other countries' holdings in our currency when we want to punish them), then I'd assume that creditor nations would start looking at replacing some or all of their US treasuries holdings with real assets that carry less counterparty risk. If we start nationalizing onshored assets, then the field of suitable assets starts narrowing a whole lot to portable things like commodities.
We should work very hard to maintain a reputation as a trustworthy counterparty if we want to be able to continue running large deficits.
You should make a case for this, rather than asking other people to make a case against it. We flooded the world with dollars after 2008 and still couldn't manage to get our inflation over 2% until a year or two ago.
I'm just trying to get you all to think a bit about effects before suggesting something as radical (for the US) as nationalizing a company. I think it's fairly obvious that going from being a very business/investor friendly country to one that nationalizes a major company for delaying passengers is going to shake confidence in foreign creditors to the US.
Public land given to them for free with the expectation that they'll maintain their ROW in proper working order and adhere to a certain social contract.
Rail workers aren’t getting sick days and trains are longer (leading to delays) because of investors squeezing rail infra and those who operate it. Why allow it to continue? The whole “privatizing profits socializing losses and externalities” is getting old, no?