[BfloGuy]

It's hard to argue that this is unfair, when you consider that the railroad industry would be non-existent today without massive government intervention and support in the latter decades of the 19th Century.

It's not hard to argue at all. It's unfair, period.

What happened a century or more ago has no bearing on what goes on today.

And isn't it interesting how close we came to Communism even as recently as the Truman administration. Can you imagine our outrage if Obama ordered the army to take over the airlines?

[Alberta's Child]

The first Federal law to regulate private companies in the U.S. was aimed specifically at the railroad industry. It was the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. It's also worth noting that the first Federal highway system was established after World War I largely to provide an alternative means of freight transportation that would compete with railroads. Political and business interests in this country had simply determined that the railroad industry had become too powerful to be left to its own devices, as evidenced by the fact that almost all of the companies in the original (pre-1996) Charles Dow index of U.S. industrial stocks were railroads.

Do some research on the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 in West Virginia and see how that ended. All of this laid the foundation for what we know as modern Federal railroad regulations.

[Alberta's Child]

And isn't it interesting how close we came to Communism even as recently as the Truman administration. Can you imagine our outrage if Obama ordered the army to take over the airlines?

Oddly enough, this is also one of the situations where we would do well to allow "international law" to protect the U.S. from its own idiocy. Some of these measures cannot be effectively implemented right now because they would be violations of various free trade agreements between the U.S. and various trading partners.

This isn't just an American thing, either. The Canadian oil industry collapsed in the 1980s after it was taken over by the Trudeau government in an attempt to regulate fuel prices. The North American Free Trade Agreement prevents the Canadian government from doing that today.