Another great train robbery. (Correction, Please!).

ITEM: Senator Ernest Hollings, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, introduced "legislation authorizing $4.6 billion a year for Amtrak as a first step toward a revitalized passenger rail system," reported the Washington Post for March 6th. "'It is evident that we need to reevaluate our nation 's rail passenger policy,' Hollings (D-S. C.) said.... 'A strong federal role was required to establish the interstate highway system and the federal aviation network. And now, federal investment in passenger rail infrastructure is critical.'"

CORRECTION: The problem with passenger railroads is not too little government involvement, but too much. Amtrak has been given some $25 billion in tax revenues since its creation in 1971, though it's beyond reasonable belief that it will ever break even. Yet, when Amtrak was being assembled, officials promised it "would experience financial losses for about three years and then become a self-sustaining enterprise."

Amtrak was begun, in part, to escape previous mismanagement that was abetted by the government. But as Dan Smoot explained in The Business End of Government (1973), the industry soon found itself "crippled because of the government controls it had invited years before." Officials are again back, hat in hand, for billions more.

Joseph Vranich, a member of the Amtrak Reform Council, and Edward Hudgins of the Cato Institute, have taken note of what Amtrak has realized for all these billions: perhaps three-tenths of one percent of all intercity passengers. While making a case for privatizing the system, their analysis also points out that Amtrak's on-time performance on most routes is "terrible," yet that is covered up by "measuring punctuality at a limited number of stops and building in lots of extra time before those stops."

There's a lot of creative record-keeping going on, as well as bureaucratic featherbedding, but it's the non-riding taxpayers who are really being railroaded.