Fresh from his featured speech at the John Locke Foundation’s 21st-anniversary dinner in Raleigh over the weekend, George Will writes in the latest Newsweek about the folly that is taxpayer-funded high-speed rail.

Remarkably widespread derision has greeted the Obama administration?s damn-the-arithmetic-full-speed-ahead proposal to spend $53 billion more (after the $8 billion in stimulus money and $2.4 billion in enticements to 23 states) in the next six years pursuant to the president?s loopy goal of giving ?80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.? ?Access? and ?high-speed? to be defined later.


Criticism of this optional and irrational spending?meaning: borrowing ?during a deficit crisis has been withering. Only an administration blinkered by ideology would persist. …


… Randal O?Toole of the Cato Institute notes that high-speed rail connects big-city downtowns, where only 7 percent of Americans work and 1 percent live. ?The average intercity auto trip today uses less energy per passenger mile than the average Amtrak train.? And high speed will not displace enough cars to measurably reduce congestion. The Washington Post says China?s fast trains are priced beyond ordinary workers? budgets, and that France, like Japan, has only one profitable line.


So why is America?s ?win the future? administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism?s aim is the modification of (other people?s) behavior.


Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons?to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives? passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans? individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.