Nationalizing is an overreach. This is why events like this have to be downplayed because if you don’t the vultures will swoop in with their own agendas and try to stir up emotions to garner support for unpopular causes.

Unpopular causes like regulating train safety and disaster handling/cleaning?

Airlines are regulated heavily and safe without nationalizing / seizing ownership.

Airline accidents kill hundreds of people outright. The media gives those stories tons of attention (If it bleeds, it leads) and accordingly the airline industry knows it must take safety seriously to protect their profits.

Meanwhile the chemical industry kill the gods only know how many thousands of people over the course of decades with a steady trickle of statistically correlated illnesses, but the media doesn't cover it and the consumers of chemical goods feel insulated from harm which seems very abstract and indirect to them. A consumer buying a chemical good is not directly imperiled by the chemical industry in the same way as an airline flier is threatened by airline crashes.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why the airline industry is better at safety than the chemical industry.

Yes I agree, that was my point. Though I was comparing train derailments overall, not chemical spills. Chemicals are needed for society.

Nationalizing trains will not help. Nationalizing chemical transfers won't help either if it's the same EPA in charge that said 9/11 debris was safe or this spill was okay.

Heavier regulations on trains may be needed, especially when transferring hazardous loads, but nationalization would be horrendous.

All that be said, investing in pipelines is a much safer form of transfer for these chemicals. Trains are too risky.

I don't see why nationalizing critical infrastructure is off the table. I know it's unrealistic because our federal government is so feckless they can't even apply safety regulations or stand up for workers.

I'll let the citizens of East Palestine know they need to stay calm lest someone propose a policy solution you don't like.

Well given the way they've been running Amtrack I don't trust their ability to run shipping.

It's confusing to me why you think nationalizing the rail company would solve any problem. The government can't even keep us safe when it's telling the rail company what to do. In fact, the issue here doesn't seem to be "rail company not listening to government" so much as "government not listening to rail workers." So you think that same government - which just legislatively forced those workers back to work - can run the rail company, while complying with all the same (and new) regulations, and also not turning it into a loss-making operation funded by taxpayers until in perpetuity (at least as long as the country/economy still exists)?

>nationalizing them

Is this a joke?

In theory, I don't see government ownership of society-critical industries with no opportunity for competition to be crazy. Tell me how you'd spin up a competing national rail line network.

The craziness appears when you realize that US governments are no more accountable than US corporations. Nobody lost their job over 9/11, or the Afghanistan pullout, or any other debacle you can name from the past few decades. Charges were dropped against the low level jail guards who allowed Jeff Epstein to die; Acosta resigned as Labor Secretary only due to public outcry and 12 years later.

Responsibility is a quaint tradition of a lost America.

It's not worth replying. "Is this a joke?" is not asking if it's a joke. It's an worthless insult. Nothing more.

Agreed they were low effort, so I put in little as well.

Ayn Rand wrote a sci-fi/political philosophy book about this exact subject, named Atlas Shrugged.

The main character in the book is a railroad executive struggling to keep her company afloat in the face of ruinous regulations that were designed to drive the rail systems towards nationalization.

The flip side of course, that she fails to address completely in that book, is unethical behavior by private industry, such as super trains with one engineer, unsafe working conditions, etc...

Also, you know, it's fucking fiction from an asshole who knew nothing about the world?

Looking around and it looks a little bit like she knew a fair bit about the world.

Do you believe that this comment adds to the conversation?

The market tried to solve this problem with workers going on strike a few months ago. Government regulations are what stopped it.

The market doesn't meaningfully have organized labor in the first place without government intervention.

It also doesn't have corporations.

(though I agree that smacking down these workers was some real bullshit)

> political philosophy

Mmph.

Hm.

I guess if Dianetics is a work on metaphysics, sure.

You may not agree with Ayn Rand, and in many cases I certainly don't, however she was a well known philosopher responsible for Objectivism and heavily influenced the formation of the Libertarian party.

There are many philosophers that I disagree with, but I wouldn't challenge whether they or their works are philosophical in nature.

Atlas Shrugged used trains and science fiction as a literary device to illustrate her philosophy.

I found it to be more engaging than her non-fiction works, which was the point, I suppose.