> While Brat bleats - and actually (and incredibly) thinks it's a
> positive - that the "Transcontinental RR Was Many Times Entire Federal
> Budget", J.J. Hill's Great Northern was built without a penny of
> federal money.
>
> Just by way of a little more background of the comparison between the
> two:
>
> "The story of the Great Northern Railway is the story of James Jerome
> Hill, a young man from Canada who settled in St. Paul, Minnesota, in
> 1856 and bought a delinquent land-grant railroad in 1878, the St. Paul
> & Pacific Railroad, and turned it into a great transcontinental
> railroad, the Great Northern Railway.... His carefully planned but
> very long rail extension across North Dakota and Montana, labeled by
> an ignorant press as "Hill's Folly," tied the mineral-rich region of
> the Montana Rockies with the fertile Red River Valley. There is the
> heroic discovery of the Marias Pass by one of Hill's competent
> lieutenants, and the final struggle to the Pacific Ocean over the
> Cascade Mountains.
>
> The railroad builder constantly improved his railroads while also
> investing his own money and resources to help farmers improve their
> production of agricultural goods shipped on his railroad.... He built
> slowly, but profitably, across a desolate, inhospitable region and
> turned it into the prosperous American Northwest of a million and half
> people..." - The Ayn Rand Bookstore
>
> But should anyone have the temerity to challenge Brat on this
> comparison with the corruption-ridden financial disaster that was the
> Union Pacific, all he can say is "take a flight to Somalia". Why?
> Because "the people" supported it and Congress has the authority to
> fund financial disasters with taxpayer's money, which of course they
> have done time and time again and continue to up to the present day.
>
> According to Brat, if private individuals aren't willing to fund
> financial disasters, it is up to Congress to do it for them. Obviously
> we don't need Congress to fund financially sound enterprises. There
> will be no shortage of private individuals willing to do that. No,
> what we need Congress for is to fund the unsound financial enterprises
> - just the kind of enterprises no sensible investor, even one willing
> to take risks, would go anywhere near.
>
> You know, like ethanol from corn.
>
> Fred Weiss