The book on this style of business plan is Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves At Government Expense (And Stick You With The Bill), and its author was recently interviewed by Bill Moyers. Here’s how David Cay Johnston put it:
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: John Snow was a brilliant young economics professor and lawyer who wrote about how the government system of regulating transportation was inefficient and causing difficult costs. And in the Ford administration– had a prominent role in promoting deregulation of trucking. Then he got a job with the CF– what’s now the CSX Railroad.
BILL MOYERS: And what is CSX?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: It’s one of the largest railroad companies in America. And that railroad, the– his mentor, Hays Watkins, won an award from INDUSTRY WEEK magazine. And the whole reason for the reward was their success at milking the government for favors. And Snow, throughout his career, spent an enormous amount of time going and meeting not with presidents of the United States but with the congressmen and senators and the staff members and the bureaucrats you’re never going to hear about in the Transportation Department and the Appropriation Department to get all the rules and favors that he wanted.
And one of the worst rules is this. If you’re on an Amtrak train and there is an accident and something happens to you, the damages that occur are always paid by the taxpayer, even if, as in the case I tell about in the book, there was a known unsafe condition that CSX caused in its zeal to cut costs and to increase Mr. Snow’s salary.
Even though Snow was warned and warned this is dangerous, we’re not doing enough for safety. There were official investigations. They stuck to their policy. They saved $2.4 billion dollars. Well, people died because of it. One widow pressed her case, got all the way to the Supreme Court with it. Got $50 million in damages awarded by a jury. Couldn’t today ’cause Governor Jeb Bush in Florida signed a law to prevent this from happening again. But got $50 million in damages. Didn’t cost CSX a penny. They just handed the bill to the taxpayers and said, “You get to pay.”
BILL MOYERS: Because this is a law.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s the law.
BILL MOYERS: Passed by Congress.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s right. And this is a moral hazard. It’s another thing that Adam Smith warned us about. You shouldn’t be able to say, “I get the rewards and you the taxpayer are going to take up all the risks.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Massachusetts people injured in this collision with CSX don’t get a penny in compensation from CSX.
Watch the whole interview with Moyers and Johnston.
Joeltpatterson, thanks for this post. I was not aware of that book or the Moyers interview but you have piqued my interest in it.
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p>Funny, how you can hear someone talking about an issue but it sometimes takes a parallel news event to make you connect the dots. The CSX accident last week was a case in point. Lt. Governor Murray has been leading the charge to stop CSX from negotiating an unfair agreement with the state in regard to the Framingham to Worcester line and the rail spurs that are involved in that. Murray claims that this CSX corporation is trying to finnagle a “no-fault” arrangement whereby in case of accidents caused by CSX negligence there would be “no-fault” and they would be free from taking responsibility for anything but damage to their own side of the loss.
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p>I must admit that I did not understand what a big deal that would be until the accident…the fates intervened, but over a hundred people could have been killed that day…and what if they were? Under the CSX-style agreement, even though CSX was at fault, they would not have been required to pay anything to those families or injured victims…the state would.
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p>Murray is right. Giving CSX a ‘no-fault” agreement is no incentive for them to manage their operation safely…and really amounts to a huge give away to a corporation that has proven lacking in concern for public safety.
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p>I hope that whomever the powers that be are that negotiate such agreements for this state will support Murray’s position and stand on the side of taxpayers and citizens who ride the rail system in this state against CSX.
I’m glad to hear this about the Lt. Gov. It makes me very glad I voted for him. I didn’t know CSX was angling for a no-fault agreement, but I’m putting in a call to my State Rep and Senator, as well as Kerry, Kennedy, and Capuano.
that killed the Florida woman’s husband–it was caused by some CSX employee substituting a rusty nail where a lynch pin should have been in a switch on the rails. Years went by with nobody from CSX checking the switches on that track, and it would have been obvious to see the problem and fix it if it had been inspected. That was a clear case of CSX being at fault…
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p>…and we, as taxpayers, paid the $50 million judgment.
The Globe reports this morning that the NTSB won’t investigate the Canton crash. Apparently they can only investigate a dozen or so of the thousands of rail accidents every year.
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p>That seems like a lot of accidents not getting followed up on — just the way the rail industry likes it, and consistent w/ the business model explained above.