An article headlined “If Obama Had Carter’s Courage…” is bound to get my attention.

Just the other day I compared Carter favorably to Obama in the arena of hypocrisy about promises not to live high on the public’s dime. Now Holman W. Jenkins offers another shining moment from the Carter past (one of which I was not previously aware): when our system of freight railroads was threatened with multiple bankruptcies and faced the grim prospect of nationalization, Carter showed courage in resisting that call, as well as in confronting the special interest groups to which politicians are ordinarily beholden:

Rail executives and economists had been arguing since the 1920s, when competition from trucks and planes began to emerge, that comprehensive federal regulation had only distorted the industry’s pricing, driven away investment, and made competitive adaptation impossible…it still took some doing on Mr. Carter’s part. When the bill stalled, a hundred phone calls went from the White House to congressmen, including 10 by Mr. Carter in a single evening. The bill essentially no longer required railroads to provide services at a loss to please certain constituencies. It meant going up against farmers, labor, utilities, mining interests, and even some railroads—whereas Mr. Obama’s auto bailout tries to appease key lobbies like labor and greens, which is why it can’t work…

That fortitude is exactly what’s missing today, as it was missing from Mr. Obama’s statement on Monday, which attributed GM’s failure to sins by everyone but Washington.

I’m extremely unfamiliar with the history of the railroads (passenger or freight) in this country—except for the usual random facts every child used to be forced to learn in school, such as the golden spike at Promontory Point; as well as a trip to Chicago I took when very young on the Twentieth Century Limited, which included sleeping berths a few inches from the ceiling for my brother and me as the old train rattled along on through the night; and then later the obligatory jokes about Amtrak coupled with several rather frustrating trips between Boston and New York on said line.

Alas, it would take me far more time than I have available at the moment to catch up on all I don’t know (which is almost everything) about the history of the US railroad system. But a very quick skimming of the Wiki entry on Amtrak and one on Conrail (the freight system Jenkins is referring to, the one with which Carter dealt) indicates it’s an intriguing story as well as a relevant one.

For example, I always thought the cause of the decline in the passenger rail system was obvious. Whoever would prefer a train ride to a car ride given the choice, except for commuters in cities with traffic so bad that driving has become an exercise in hair-tearing frustration and futility? And it’s certainly true that passenger railroads probably would have declined when faced with stiff auto competition no matter what they’d tried to do to compete.

But they never really had a chance; even before autos represented especially keen competition, the hands of the passenger rail industry were tied—by the federal government:

The first interruption in passenger rail’s vibrancy coincided with government intervention. From approximately 1910 to 1921, the Federal government introduced a populist rate-setting scheme, followed by nationalization of the rail industry for World War I. Ample railroad profits were erased, growth of the rail system was reversed, and railroads massively underinvested in passenger rail facilities during this time. Meanwhile, labor costs advanced, and with them passenger fares, which discouraged passenger traffic just as automobiles gained a foothold.

Compare and contrast to Conrail (I’ve excerpted only a small portion of its lengthy history, in which Carter was only one player of many) [emphasis mine]:

In the years leading to 1973, the freight railroad system of the U.S. was collapsing…

The Staggers Act allowed the setting of rates that would recover capital and operating cost (fully allocated cost recovery) by each and every route mile the railroad operated. There would be no more cross-subsidization of costs between route-miles (i.e., rates on profitable route segments were not set higher to subsidize routes where rates were set at intermodal parity, yet still did recover fully allocated costs). Finally where current and/or future traffic projections showed that profitable volumes of traffic would not return, the railroads were allowed to abandon those routes, shippers and passengers to other modes of transportation. With the Staggers Act, the railroads, including Conrail, were freed from the requirement to operate services with open ended losses for the public convenience and necessity of those who simply chose rail services as their mode of transportation.

Seems to me there are a number of lessons here, the first of which is that government bailouts without significant government deregulation of unreasonable mandates and taxes hampering a failing industry are doomed to fail themselves, and all such bailouts will therefore be a waste of taxpayer money. In addition, keeping an industry in private hands is better at turning a profit than nationalization—as long as the government doesn’t tie those hands unreasonably in order to favor other special interest groups.

Obama seems to be on a course to disobey all those lessons. Carter, to his credit, was not.