Nails in the Coffin of Statist Ideas

John Stossel and Robert Samuelson just can't miss.  They keep swinging those big economic freedom hammers and keep hitting those crazy liberty nails right square on their heads, fastening ever tighter the coffin lid on the Obama's preferred state-planned economy.

Here Stossel explains prices as information and their ability to enable spontaneous economic organization.  In a free market, that is.

And here Samuelson explains just how economically dead high speed rail schemes are. 

I really like this paragraph:

Rail buffs argue that subsidies for passenger service simply offset the huge government support of highways and airways. The subsidies "level the playing field." Wrong. In 2004, the Transportation Department evaluated federal transportation subsidies from 1990 to 2002. It found passenger rail service had the highest subsidy ($186.35 per thousand passenger-miles) followed by mass transit ($118.26 per thousand miles). By contrast, drivers received no net subsidy; their fuel taxes more than covered federal spending. Subsidies for airline passengers were about $5 per thousand miles traveled. (All figures are in inflation-adjusted year 2000 dollars.)

Those are numbers worth writing on your palm in indelible ink, just to have them handy.

Samuelson did it last fall, too.

That coffin is getting pretty full of statist ideas.  Time to start digging the hole.