Explore "Government Ownership of Railroads, and War Taxation" by Otto H. Kahn on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
You all know the result. The spirit of enterprise in railroading was killed. Subjected to an obsolete and incongruous national policy, hampered, confined, harassed by multifarious, minute, narrow, and sometimes flatly contradictory regulations and restrictions, State and Federal, starved as to rates in the face of steadily mounting costs of labor and materials -- that great industry began to fall away. Initiative on the part of those in charge became chilled, the free flow of investment capital was halted, creative ability was stopped, growth was stifled, credit was crippled.
The theory of governmental regulation and supervision was entirely right. No fair-minded man would quarrel with that. The railroads had exercised great, and in certain respects undoubtedly excessive power for a long time, and all power tends to breed abuses and requires limitations and restraints. But the practical application of that theory was wholly at fault and in defiance of both economic law and common sense. It was bound to lead to a crisis.