Robert Samuelson writes that high-speed rail won't work in America because we're much less densely populated than the European and Asian countries that use bullet trains.
Dean Baker and Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias point out that this argument is ridiculous, since certain areas of the U.S. are just as dense as Europe/Asia, and since bullet trains are for going between cities anyway. Duh, right?
Which brings us to the question of why conservatives just don't like bullet trains. It's hard to get my head around this. Maybe bullet trains area waste of money, but that never stopped conservatives before - missile defense is a waste of money too. And it's not like bullet trains benefit the poor, since the tickets are fairly expensive. Here's my hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: Bullet trains aren't "the way we do things." It may be the case that conservatives just don't want to admit that Europe and Japan did anything better than we did during the 20th century. They went for trains, we went for cars. Maybe conservatives, who are notorious for re-fighting old fights (Vietnam, women's liberation), feel like building bullet trains now would be an admission of America's Cold War era non-perfection.
Hypothesis 2: Bullet trains help Democratic-voting areas. High-density urban areas are very Democratic-leaning, and bullet trains would be likely to disproportionately boost the economies of big cities. From the point of view of someone who thinks big cities are not the "real America," this is a pointless thing to do. And bullet trains would make more people move to urban areas, hurting Republican electoral prospects.
Hypothesis 3: A win for the government is a loss for Zombie Reaganism. Conservatives are just trying to prevent any kind of government involvement in the economy, for any reason, even if that involvement would be economically beneficial, because a successful demonstration of public goods provision would expose the silliness of their laissez-faire ideology.
Well? Which is it? I'm just waiting for Robert Samuelson or the guys at Cato to come over and comment on my blog...
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