More Regarding Charles "Three Terms" Bass, and Tax-funded Transit Proposals in NH

Editor's Note: This piece was written in response to an Op-ed by PGG, published in the Nashua Telegraph, Nashua, NH.

“Trainspotting”
February 11, 2002

The discussion continues regarding a tax-payer funded train system from Lowell to Nashua. On February 2, Mr. Charlie Matthews responded to my criticism of Rep. Charlie Bass’ proposal to channel $66 million to such a project. His response is an educational example of how imprecise editing can shade the meaning of a piece, and how people can overlook the larger economic picture when considering subsidies for projects at home.
    
Mr. Matthews states, “... while Mr. Goldsmith isn’t impressed at the prospect of taking 1,000 cars off the highway every day, I sure am!”  What Mr. Matthews fails to understand is that the estimate noted above is not an established fact; it is  claim, made by Mr. Bass, the proponent of the expenditure
    
In my initial letter, I stated:
    
“According to Mr. Bass, the rail proposal is ‘a worthwhile project’. It would result in 1000 fewer cars on the highways each day. It would help alleviate congestion, and help ensure the growth and success of southern New Hampshire.”
    
The published piece, as edited by the Telegraph, broke the statement into two paragraphs, thus making it less clear that the sentences regarding 1,000 fewer cars and less congestion on NH roads were merely claims by Charlie Bass, and not in any way accepted truths.
    
It would be nice to imagine that there would be 1,000 fewer cars every day, but such an assumption overlooks a great many other considerations, including how people will travel to the train station, where they will park, the general lack of interest in the local bus system in Nashua, public transit’s less than stellar history, and the already allocated Route 3 expansion in progress between Burlington and Nashua.
    
Mr. Matthews attempts to support his facile claims that the tax-funded extension is justified by noting that passenger rail is subsidized throughout the world. This is a tautology, a self-indictment of public systems. In fact, in over forty countries, bankrupt tax-subsidized rail systems are being licensed out to private operators, precisely because they are not efficient. While Mr. Matthews looks to a glorious future of tax-funded trains rolling out of Nashua, many people in other nations, many certainly the same nations he noted that subsidize train service because it “makes economic and environmental sense”, have turned away from the government run paradigm towards private initiative.
    
The claim that tax-funded rail systems make economic and environmental sense is patently false, totally insupportable, and makes for very risky political disputation. It is axiomatic that if something makes economic sense, it can sustain itself without the forced seizure of tax money from those who do not use it.
    
As Edmund Contaski noted in his 1997 book, “Makers and Takers”:
    
“In the same way that profitable enterprise is supported voluntarily, though incidentally, by others because they benefit from it, every enterprise that can’t make a profit is providing less benefit to society than its cost. It is doing more to consume wealth than to enrich the lives of others. But it’s precisely to such enterprises and individuals that tax money is allocated, to those who offer less in return than they receive. Profitable enterprises don’t need tax support, and those that aren’t profitable don’t deserve other people’s money. By subsidizing the unprofitable, government acts against the minds and interests of free men. In the case of AMTRAK, for example, the government has forced the taxpayers to buy billions of Dollars worth of passenger rail service which their lack of patronage already indicated they didn’t want.” (p. 76-77)
    
Mr. Matthews’ citation of differing BTU energy efficiencies between trains and planes, which he employs to support his claims regarding environmental payoffs, overlooks large dynamic economic considerations. If one were not to consider factors such as speed, accessibility, comfort and economic efficiency in a calculation of relative benefits of various modes of transport, we would be discussing the merits of a tax-funded horse and buggy route from Nashua to Lowell. This kind of Luddite philosophy is, hopefully, only in vogue with certain petuli-wearing hippies and college professors pushing for more federal control of the economy under the pretense of “saving the ecology.” From the rest of society, one might hope for more sensible, ethical, and constitutional decision making. Let’s leave the military defense of the nation up to the feds,  drop the pretense about the environment, and allow private enterprise to risk its own capital on ventures such as passenger trains.

                            Sincerely,

                            P.Gardner Goldsmith

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