If I recall my history of the Illinois Central, and later the Pacific Railroad Bill, building the newfangled railroads was the moonshot of the day, with the Federal, State, and Local Governments giving away millions of acres of taxpayer owned land to the railroads, and tens of millions of dollars in construction subsidies based on track completed.

What would have been the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars of Federally subsidized capital investment per year were spent on direct payments to private railroad companies to construct cuts and tunnels, clear right of way, build grades, buy rails, and ties, locomotives, cars, not to mention paying the thousands of workers, and the millions in transportation costs to ship stuff to railheads in the middle of nowhere.

And, this great "socialist conspiracy" to create opportunities to enrich America and our people with government investment in this newfangled infrastructure, that made the lands that were given to the railroads to help "subsidize" construction worth selling, so we could create the means to transport our bounty more cheaply, and was to give us a future of wealth and comfort, was presided over by none other than the first Republican President, a fellow named Abraham Lincoln.

Now, once again, we are again in the hands of the jackbooted government thugs, who are trying to force us to "redistribute wealth" to those awful trains, in order to have a viable rail alternative to $4 gas, at an annual cost about half the life cycle cost of a single modern fighter?

And, if it was as easy to fix everything that's wrong, with the simplistic bull that most politicians like to spew and spout at election time, none of us would probably need to work at all.....