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Throttling The Railroads By Clarence Carson Hard Cover 1971
Throttling The Railroads By Clarence Carson Hard Cover 1971 132 Pages
Preface
THIS LITTLE volume belongs, loosely, to a cycle of works which took shape as a result of my writing The Flight from Reality, which was published as a book by The Foundation for Economic Education in 1969 but which had been published serially in The Freeman during a 26-month period from 1964 into 1966. To that point, most of my writings could have been classified as social and intellectual history, though they had somewhat of an economic focus to them as well. Since writing The Flight from Reality, my work has gone decidedly over into economic history. What I was trying to say in that book thrust me in this new direction.
The idea I was working with in The Flight from Reality was that the reformist and interventionist ideas and practices which have been gaining headway over the last eighty or ninety years have not produced the results which presumably motivated and have frequently been claimed for them. On the contrary, the results have frequently been the opposite of what they should have been, according to the claims. I tried to show that the reason for this lay in contradictions between the reformers' notions of it and reality itself.
As for the results, however, I alluded to them only in The Flight from Reality. After that, it became important to spell them out. One reason that this led me to economic history was that the reformers had focused so much of their attention on economic matters. Another was that the cause and effect relationships involved seemed to me more clearly traceable in the economic realm than, say, in the moral realm or in literature, for instance. That may have been so because I had become increasingly sensitized to the economic realm. In any case, the cycle of works to which I referred at the beginning has dealt most extensively with economic history.
The first work after The Flight was The War on the Poor (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969). The theme of this book was that government programs that were supposed to help the poor have usually harmed them. This was followed by "The Rise and Fall of England," published serially in The Freeman (1968-1969). As is probably obvious from the title, this was a broad-scoped work dealing with several hundred years of English history. One of its main themes was that government intervention in the economy of England contributed greatly to the fall of that country from its former leading role in the world.
The present work attempts to trace the effects of intervention on a particular industry-that of the American railroad industry. The pattern of the cycle of works goes from the general to the particular. If it were carried one step further, the effects of intervention on a particular company might be examined. Many academicians trained in the English-speaking world may suppose that I have gone about the matter wrongend-to, that I should have gone from the particular to the general rather than from the general to the particular. The inductive method is frequently described as involving the latter order of working and presenting findings.
I could object that that is not the way I worked, that I worked from the general to the particular and that is that. But that would be to make an unnecessary confession of personal eccentricity which, in this case, would not be correct. In point of fact, the general rule is that the acquisition of knowledge proceeds from the general to the particular, that is, proceeds from certain premises, theories, axioms, or principles. This is as true of what is today referred to as scientific knowledge as of any other kind. We did not make exploratory flights into space after which we concluded that the universe is governed by laws uniform in their operation. On the contrary, this premise was implicit in the Copernican system, and was explicit in the work of Kepler and Newton. True, we have had some amazing empirical confirmations of the validity of this premise in recent years, but the odds against our having acquired the information by making the flights without the premise of uniformity are too great to guess at. In the same manner, scientists did not go from the particulars of atom smashing to the formula E=MC. It was the other way around. They did not even discover the atom before smashing it; instead, they posited such a unit and theorized about it.
It is said that water cannot rise above its source. It can be said with equal validity that our knowledge cannot expand beyond our theoretical framework. The reason for this is simple enough; we would not know what we knew if we knew something outside a framework for knowing it, which is a way of saying that we could not know such a thing. All this is by way of saying that our knowledge is an unfolding of what is implicit in our premises, theories, and principles. This makes the premises and their correctness most important. I have long thought so, and have taken care from time to time to set forth some of those on which I was working. They are testable, too, but since philosophy has fallen into its present disuse many premises go untested. Both reason and evidential particulars play a role in this testing.
This cycle of works, then, has followed the norm by moving from the general to the particular. The railroads turned out to be a happy choice for an industry in which to examine the impact of intervention. They have been subject to intervention for a long while in American history. Everyone admits that the railroads are in some sort of crisis. This little book attempts to show how this state of affairs came about. It does so tracing the story of the building of the railroads, their operation and development over the years, and the intertwining of intervention with these. The framework for this tale is the nature of railroading, the nature of government, the nature of man, and the nature of economy. These premises would enable us to project that the outcome of the intervention would be what it has, indeed, been.
Something else led me to a particular study of the railroads. I have long been fascinated by trains, by their operations, their history, their terminals, and their schedules. My interest has never been quite so active as to qualify me as a railroad buff. But it has been sufficiently extensive to prompt me eventually to have the temerity to write something about them.
I have been most fortunate in my writing over the years to have done so much of it for The Foundation for Economic Education and to have had a good bit of it published in the Foundation's journal, The Freeman, in which most of the chapters first appeared. A writer's work is, by its nature, lonely. So much of writing is done in solitaire, laboriously struggling in the silence to fill the paper void before one with words. Once the words have been shaped into something larger-an essay, an article, a chapter, or whatever-most writers then have a great urge to exhibit, one which I share. We would run into the street to grab the first passerby and present him with a reading of the fruits of our labor. Unfortunately, strangers rarely tolerate us, and our list of friends grows shorter on each presentation. We learn, after awhile, to restrain our exuberance, to send our work off to an editor, and to await his verdict, realizing that, however long it takes to hear from him, it will take much longer before it is finally published and a more general verdict is in. I like to write books, even, but the length of the task overwhelms me.
A part of my good fortune in having done much of my work for The Foundation for Economic Education is that much of this waiting has been foreshortened by them. Dr. Paul L. Poirot, the editor of The Freeman, is dependably prompt and decisive in dealing with work submitted to him. I have even been enabled to write what turned out to be books, a chapter at a time, have the chapters published serially, and get some results long before a book would be published.
My gratitude to The Foundation, and to Leonard E. Read who directs its course and informs its actions with his vitality and integrity, has deeper dimensions than the above. Most of my work goes against the grain of the spirit of the times. The worshipers of the state and the apologists of intervention have held sway in the academy and most of the publishing world since I can remember being aware of such things. FEE has made it possible for me to have my say; it has been worth much to me to be able to do so, though of the value of my work for others I can hardly be the judge.
My thanks go to Mrs. Eleanor B. Orsini who has done the work of reading and correcting copy quietly and efficiently. Of course, none of the people who helped me with my work should be blamed for any errors of fact or invalidities of interpretation which may appear in this book. The responsibility for any of those is unavoidably mine.
My wife, Myrtice Sears Carson, has not only put up with the inconveniences of having me spend so much time at writing but also has aided me materially by reading copy before it went off to the printer, listened to my disorganized notions about how I proposed to proceed on the work, and applied herself diligently to providing peaceful surroundings in which I could work.
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