Public Transit? No, Private Transit!

Socialists, wannabe college professors and anyone promoting a political agenda that they garnered from the glistening screens of CNN utopianism, often times utilize a certain mental trickery to portray those they disagree with seem "extremist". The trick involves an unspoken assumption that the State and Society are one and in the same. For example, if I state that, "Public transit is a poor and inefficient means of carting people around, not to mention a waste of tax payer dollars", then the Cooper Anderson struck, "government is awesome" do-gooder might respond with, "Why are you against Mass Transist? Are you some kind of oil company lobbyist?". This mode of reasoning is anti-intellectual at best and terribly dishonest at worst. Just because I think pointing a gun to hard working people of Minnesota and forcing them to empty their wallets to the tune of $1,000,000,000 to build a poorly (if at all) managed train and tracks that hauls people from downtown Minneapolis to the Mall of America seems like THEFT to me, doesn't mean that I don't like mass transportation. I just don't like government owned, operated mass transportation that uses force to steal my property to pay for it.

Once upon a time the Twin Cities had a privately owned mass transit system that was the envy of the nation. Did you get that? We had a PRIVATELY owned mass transportation system that made a profit, and provided a service that individuals were willing to pay for WITHOUT the threat of force on behalf of the government. Twin City Rapid Transit was started back in 1867 and was considered the best mass transit option in the entire United States, . TCRT operated for almost a hundred years, until GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil formed a holding company that bought and destroyed the company. The media and the history books like to blame the "evil capitalists" for doing such a terrible thing, but these were no capitalists. These were corporatists, who had the go ahead of a federal government who promised cheap subsidized oil, and free federally funded multi-lane highways. If the government would have never subsidized the automobile, gas and highways, we'd still have a highly functional, privately paid for and maintained transportation system. We'd be $1,000,000,000 better off as tax payers and only the people who actually used the train would pay for it. I'm guessing that it would probably offer free wireless internet also.

The point of this rant is that just because someone argues against a government program, likes public schools, public transit or public health care, it doesn't mean that they are against those programs. They just believe that someone else can do them better, cheaper and without the use of a gun pointed at the individuals head.