At the stroke of midnight, I wrote that one of things from which America should declare herself independent was Austrian economics. So it is. But Austria, like Chicago, is mercifully immune to the economic system developed among her socially, culturally and politically more disengaged inhabitants. As Neil Clark writes:
I spent this Christmas in Austria, a country which, thankfully, has been wise enough not to follow the British path and privatise its entire economy.
In Austria, not only are the railways still in public ownership but prices are determined by a simple distance-based system, with the price you pay determined by the number of kilometres you travel.
At rush hour, instead of fares rising to price people off the trains, Austrian State Railways simply lays on more trains with more carriages.
Even at the busiest times, travellers always get a seat, as they do in other European countries which operate under the same model.
Compare this to what happens in Britain, where commuters, having forked out a fortune for their season tickets, face years of overcrowding, because the train companies prefer to ram people like sardines into trains rather than lease extra carriages from the rolling stock companies.
It was disclosed recently that overcrowding on Britain's trains was so bad that commuters were being allocated less space than the EU minimum for transporting farm animals.
The late "One Nation" Tory Sir Ian Gilmour, a staunch critic of privatisation, called his party's proposal to privatise the railways "crazy." He was putting it mildly.
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