how did Europe ever get railroads?

[ryan costa]

In America we were sparsely populated when the railroads hit the seen. So the Feds granted the right lobbyists lots of Acres to build rail roads. We had millions of Acres for pennies an Acre, and could sell it for 2 dollars an acre or give it to the right people. Its the foundation of our cult of no-taxes.

How did Europe ever build railroads? it was much more densely populated. And all of the land was already owned by the patriarchs of a few families who had owned it for hundreds of years.

[Stephen Calhoun]

Ryan, why do you trot out bad intuitions about well researched and known history? I really cannot fathom where you are coming from. Why not read up and satisfy your curiosity?

When you're not being droll and ironic, I feel you introduce your guesswork without any guile. But, this just made me slap my forehead and wonder why you didn't first spend fifteen minutes with google or at LPL to inform yourself.

[ryan costa]

Ryan, why do you trot out bad intuitions about well researched and known history? I really cannot fathom where you are coming from. Why not read up and satisfy your curiosity?

It is because of the presidential election. I end up hearing more advertisements for "conservative" radio show hosts. It is irritating, and I try figuring out the myths of small government and also the contexts in which what small government we had managed to thrive to the extent it thrived. Posting brief snippets here is cheaper than advertising for radio shows that don't exist.

[Stephen Calhoun]

Wow.

So, if I read you correctly, you posted two nonsensical snippets about railroads because, in effect, you're musing out loud about the myths of small government, and this is itself evoked by the election year.

As a reader, the snippets came across as uninformed, so I wondered why they were plugged in here? Now I have my answer.

You might consider cozying up with Commager and Morison's A Concise History of the American Republic. Great read, (a classic,) and reading it would address most of the gaps in your intuitive knowledge of American history.

[ryan costa]

I've read enough encyclopedia and book passages to understand it took massive land grants to get American railroads going. It took a lot of government Oomph! they enjoyed monopoly privileges, and many were terrible at bookkeeping. It also took a lot of Chinese and Irish labor to do the excavating and track laying: Mark Twain wrote a lot of (Humorous?) comparisons between the two labor forces: It was easier to cheat the Chinese because they weren't white, and also ok to cheat the Irish, because they were a substandard version of white.

The point is....it never happened like in Atlas Shrugged or Bonanza or Little House on the Prairie. There's a lot of Romantic revisionism about the American 19th century. This provides a strong emotional nudge for Americans to not get very introspective about their governments. So they vote against domestic welfare programs, and for putting large sections of the rest of the world on welfare(after very expensive nation building policies(coups or outright military intervention)). There's an almost cargo cult like mentality about merchandise and commodities increasing indefinitely once "big government" is out of the way.

[Stephen Calhoun]

I've read enough encyclopedia and book passages

That's the funniest thing I've read all day.

Thanks for the chuckle.

[ryan costa]

I've read enough encyclopedia and book passages

That's the funniest thing I've read all day.

Thanks for the chuckle.

I've observed that most railroads are built on the ground. The ground exists within territory. Neither ground or territory are drawn by idealism out of thin air or magic dimensional expansion. The railroads relied on the government to acquire the territory for a few cents an acre, then basically hand it to them. they usually got a lot more than a 24 foot wide cross section for just the rails.

In a purely "free" market, it would be impossible for a railroad to acquire all the property or permanent easements or leases for railroads of any length. Each dollar they had previously invested would be an incentive to finish the railroad. Each additional property owner they would have to purchase land or leases from would be able to charge much higher prices. Fortunately all territory west of the Appalachia Mountains was so sparsely populated it was difficult to bid up the price of land. It was even difficult to bid up much of the land east of the Appalachian Mountains: That's why so many Virginia Gentleman like Thomas Jefferson went broke.

Still, one of the conventions of "western" literature and films is some pioneer owning land, then having a railroad or mining company or timber baron or rancher or land speculator with bigger credentials show up and have enough lawyers for all records of that pioneer owning that land disappear. It must have happened fairly frequently in real life for it to be a literary convention.

[Stephen Calhoun]

Ryan, you're a stitch. We're both tricksters. Anyway, you buried yourself by putting out nonsense in the first post of this thread. Have you convinced me over the months that you know much of anything about history or economics?

Suggestion: stop guessing and typing. Go inform yourself. There's no other alternative route to "subject matter" credibility. imo

Meanwhile, I shall now try to guess how old you are!

[ryan costa]

I have read thousands of books, encyclopedia articles, and science/history/Geography magazines and journals over the last 20 years. (Granted, I would be making more money if they had all been about plumbing or concrete masonry.) I don't remember most of the titles or authors or which pages any of the information was on.

The physical nature of a railway automatically grants monopoly-like power. I've never read of a mainline railway paying near-market prices for miles of land rights a few dozen feet wide.

Sooner or later it will be necessary to rebuild all the railways that have been torn down over the last 80 years. It is simply far more fuel efficient to transport people and freight that way. How long we wait will determine how urgent it is to do that. The more urgent it is, the more most customers and the public will be gouged or flimflammed just for the initial rebuilding phase. The less romantic libertarian revisionism there is about the 1800s, the less the customers and public will be gouged. And think of all the money we'll save on resource wars and other expeditionary government activities across the oceans.


It will probably be necessary to regulate their rates like some utilities used to be regulated, with an acceptable range of profit margins based on expenses. that is ok: modern accounting is sophisticated enough to make anything cost anything.

[Stephen Calhoun]

I'm making a process point here, Ryan.

You came to a point one day when you decided to start a topic on the Deck,

How did Europe ever get railroads?

I suppose just prior to initiating this topic you mused to yourself, 'Well, I know something about this topic, I've read thousands of books, and so here goes.'

But that constituted your mistake because your initial post on the topic reveals that you don't know anything about the topic you chose yourself to roll out.

That's not a problem of my ignorance, it's a problem revealed clearly to be yours.

There's nothing you can do about it now. I've advised you to inform yourself. I can't force you to do so. But rolling out more blather doesn't do anything but reinforce the display of your ignorance.

What's weird to me is that somebody would make something up, post it as if it was an impressive point of erudition, and all along assume nobody in the presumptive 'audience' actually knows how railroads came about in the US, let alone Europe.

I don't remember most of the titles or authors or which pages any of the information was on.

You haven't even bothered to appeal to what somebody else knows irrespective of your being able to source such an appeal. It hardly matters --on points of historical facts--how you've educated yourself if what you 'remember' is only contained in your head and can be found nowhere else.

Stick with what you know, you have to admit, isn't bad advise. Masonry, is it?

[dl meckes]

I suppose just prior to initiating this topic you mused to yourself, 'Well, I know something about this topic, I've read thousands of books, and so here goes.'

What validates that assumption?

You have your own process which, from what I have seen, is quite unique to you.

Did you decide to become a self-appointed intention monitor and does that job include the intentions of all or only Mr. Costa?

My read of which poster is an expert on what topic can only be measured by their words and whatever understanding and interpretations I bring to them. I am sure that each of us has heard nonsense from experts and non-experts alike.

Sometimes, Mr. Calhoun, you and I may read the same words and disagree upon whether or not we find a particular poster to be vexing and perplexing or Puckish and provocative.

[Stephen Calhoun]

DL, I observe and may make suppositions inferred from those observations wherever and whenever. Specific suppositions may be, even may likely be, erroneous. Any supposition (of mine) is subject to revision based in new information, new observations, etc..

Yup, I monitor a lot of stuff all the time everywhere. Ryan's intention is still unknown to me.

***

Experts do say inexpert things. So what?

People who do not know what they are talking about will sometimes make a lucky inspired guess, but most often their guesswork is uninformed. It kind of goes with the territory.

Also, if somebody reads something that isn't true and yet believes it to be true, it's probable that writer and reader both don't know the subject at hand.

Best policy: stick with what you know. If you don't know something, go check it out, investigate, deal with the letter of the subject.

[Stan Austin]

sounds like a cool pause to me

[ryan costa]

This is all moot now that the railroads already have pretty much all the right-of-ways they will ever need. and it is good that they do.

I had previously read most of the following in old books and encyclopedias 15 to 20 years ago. While I remember what the information meant, I didn't remember the exact names and precise numbers. For the sake of easy research i will cite wikipedia articles. I cannot vouch for authenticity.

The Pacific Railway Acts gave 175 million acres (708,000 km²) of public land to Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad. This was greater than 10 percent of the entire United States. they were subsidized with bonds for $16,000 to 48,000 dollars per mile of track. They eventually paid it back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Act

The Northern Pacific Railway was granted 47 million acres. It relied on the Army to evict Native Americans whose treaties(contracts) were no longer valid. It then recruited settlers from Europe to pay rent or purchase parcels of land. There was no cheap land for free or sale in Europe. The settlers produced agricultural goods and mined ore to ship to the industrial north. The South didn't have much industry: they had a lot of plantations, and a lot of poor whites and poor blacks. In 1873 the british bribed Congress to put us back on the Gold Standard, and a severe recession impeded railroad construction and southern industrialization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Pacific_Railway

The Great Northern Railroad was assembled by buying out earlier railroads who had already received their land grants, then failed. You could buy them at a margin of what it cost to make them. the rest of the lands bought were too marginal to have invested in before. The end points already had enough industry enabled by previous advances in railroads and shipping.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railroad

The Homestead Act granted about 1.6 million applicants 270 million acres. An applicant could get between 1 and 160 acres. This was 10 percent of land in the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_act

The Preemption Act allowed squatters to purchase land for very little(up to 160 acres) before it was auctioned to the general public. There was not much cheap land in the original 13 colonies. There was not much free or cheap land in Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preemption_Act_of_1841

The Land Ordinance of 1785 was how we redistributed the Northwest Territories to ourselves after overthrowing the British in the American Revolution. The standards of selling it were to raise money to pay off the war debt and avoid having to raise too many direct federal taxes. It is a great way to avoid having to have much government or taxes at all, so long as there is always more land to sell, and the British and French were too busy fighting in Europe to launch a serious invasion of America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Ordinance_of_1785

Southern states were eager for Federal Government oomph in evicting reasonably assimilated and modern groups of Native Americans from lands they had previously had treaties for. It seemed easier than counting them as actual citizens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_tears

The primary occupation of many gentleman in Virginia was inheriting a lot of land and slaves. The problem with this is that when there are multiple sons, most of them will inherit much less than the entire plantation and all the slaves. When the younger heirs sold their share for bonds or notes that never got repaid, they had to get government jobs and enter into land speculation in the Northwest Territory. Like William Henry Harrison

In Conclusion, our civilization is going to hit the wall sooner or later in regards to fossil fuel. It took a lot of government oomph to get each phase of our infrastructure in place, and will take a lot of government oomph to get successive phases of infrastructure in place. There was no ideal libertarian past, just a profoundly lucky simpletarian past.

Authorities in the media from across the economic right wing spectrum have generally been advocates of trying to control policy in the vicinity of the Oilstan nations. So far this has been more expensive and less productive than changing domestic policies would have been.

[Stephen Calhoun]

It's "moot" but you brought it up. Wow! I still have no idea why you jumped without a parachute.

You originally wrote:

In America we were sparsely populated when the railroads hit the seen. So the Feds granted the right lobbyists lots of Acres to build rail roads. We had millions of Acres for pennies an Acre, and could sell it for 2 dollars an acre or give it to the right people. Its the foundation of our cult of no-taxes.

How did Europe ever build railroads? it was much more densely populated. And all of the land was already owned by the patriarchs of a few families who had owned it for hundreds of years.

Fetid kernals amidst poppycock.

I cannot vouch for authenticity.

(We've established this already.) Now you've begun to inform yourself. Good. I salute you, Ryan.