Comment by rayiner
3 months ago
> was surprising. Goes against the idea that deregulation allows companies to squeeze consumers and earn excess profits.
That's because this assertion is economically illiterate. Deregulation can lead to increased profits where otherwise companies have monopoly power. But often, the regulation was there in the first place to ensure that companies had sufficient profit to invest in expensive infrastructure. (E.g. railroads).
That also didn't work well. The US is notoriously very poor in railroads.
For passengers, yes, but primarily it’s poor for passengers because the infra is owned by freight companies that aren’t interested in passenger service. And rail freight service in the US is mostly pretty good.
And, at the time, they needed a lot of rail across huge distances. The transcontinental rail lines were hugely expensive and had immense amounts of graft involved in every step of their construction, but they got built. Also enabled the crushing of Native Americans, which was a usually-somewhat-tacit (though sometimes very explicit) goal in Washington.
The U.S. has the best rail infrastructure in the world. It’s just designed for moving cargo across what used to be the world’s largest industrial center instead of moving passengers around.
Yeah well not everybody agrees : https://sites.lafayette.edu/engineers-in-bonn/2025/04/22/us-...
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The US, before deregulation, had a whole lot of railroads going bankrupt. This was partly because factories closed but the railroad couldn't abandon the line that served those factories, because of regulation.
I mean, they are still regulated, and they still have to go through regulators to abandon a line (IIUC), but it's much faster than it was.