Why I Love Trains

In his polemic “Why Do Progressives Love Trains?” Bob Higgs notes that the leftist elite have an awe for rail transport that borders on spiritual sentiment. Reasoning with a railroad worshiper is like reasoning with a religious zealot. All talk of the privacy, flexibility, and convenience that automobiles can offer is brushed off as contrary to the revealed gnosis of auspicious light rails and high-speed trains.

Bob Higgs is right to point out the biases of established centrism. But I do feel that his portrayal of rail transport as wholly undesirable and unsustainable is a little unfair. I, for one, love to ride the train from time to time. I am perfectly willing to forgo the privacy in preference for other things – like the freedom to sit there and stare out the window without having to keep my eyes on the road or worry about sharp turns and sudden stops. There’s a certain amount of responsibility that comes with driving which I am more than willing to delegate to another person. And I’m sure there are other people like me – people whose idea of a good Friday afternoon is nothing more complicated than sitting at a table with one or two friends, eating sandwiches and sipping malt, and gazing out the window at the passing bridges and bulrushes and telephone cables.

Sure, there is something to be said about the endless subsidies that Amtrak survives on. But there’s also something to be said about the subsidies that all car-driving Americans rely on to get from home to work and back again. We all know that without subsidized roads, subsidized water, and subsidized security on loans, there would be no such thing as sprawling suburbs in the desert. (Just as without subsidized water and subsidized feed and limits on the liability of polluters there would be no such thing as factory farms, and meat would be considerably more expensive.)

I guess my main point is this: too often we let our cultural biases get in the way of our theory and analysis. We look at the hemp sandal and synthetic wool pullover wearing yuppies who drink their soy fair trade lattes in coffee mugs rather than paper cups (because they shudder at the thought of producing solid waste that they can’t use to fertilize their lima bean garden) and we assume that they want to force onto us a dream world that can’t happen without the forceful extraction of wealth – all the while forgetting that the world we envision is marked by collective privilege propped up by subsidy upon subsidy and eminent domain upon eminent domain.

If all our principles were recognized as law, whose dream world would it really be? I see toll booths charging exorbitant fees on southbound 17 on warm Saturdays and Sundays. Not that that’s a bad thing. Those of us who can’t afford to drive to Santa Cruz can run to Alviso with inflatable rafts and splash around in the Bay. I see tolls on 101 being so high on weekdays that half of us may as well walk to the nearest Caltrain station. And if the cost of maintaining a rail line really turns out to be too high, then I may be sipping my beverage of choice on a bus instead. The libertarian spirit is not paranoia. It is the dogma of individual sovereignty, colored with confidence in the human mind. It does not eschew otherness. It is curious, and open, and it smiles on all the outcome of its principles.