It took just six years for men working with their hands to build the nearly 3,000-km-long first U.S. transcontinental railway in the 1860s, notes Rich Lowry in Jewish World Review. In Democrat-run 21st century California, US$15 billion and 17 years have been consumed without laying a single mile of track for the state’s high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The latest cost estimate: US$100 billion.
Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.
