Since you have read more about it than I have, I will take your word about the railroad crooks. They could never have gotten away with it, though, without government help. It was their government sponsored monopoly that made it possible for them to gouge their customers once they had made them dependent on the railroads to ship all their product. But what would have been the alternative? I read somewhere that, in the early railroad days, there were all these little companies with different gauges of track, and you couldn't ship stuff very far without unloading it from one car and reloading it on somebody else's car that couldn't run on the other guy's track. At some point, they must have standardized things, which must have required the different companies to cooperate with each other. So how did they get from that point to the government sponsored monopolies that characterized the industry in its later days? If the railroad barons bought off the government people, then the government people were just as guilty as the barons were because it's just as unethical to accept a bribe as it is to offer one.
It's true that the government owns a lot of "crappy" land out west, but they also own some valuable stuff like the national parks and military bases. Also, I think that all the Indian reservations are included in that 50%. The way I understand it, the Indians don't actually own their reservation lands, the government owns it "in trust" or something like that. A lot of the crappy land is leased out to modern day cattle, lumber, and mining barons. I doubt that these guys would want to own this land themselves because then they would have to take better care of it and pay taxes on it. I read somewhere that these leases are sweetheart deals that are traditionally passed down from father to son. To be fair, I read this a long time ago, and there was some talk of reforming the system at the time, but I don't know if it ever happened.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are just as many crooks in the government as there are in private industry, so turning everything over to government ownership wouldn't do a whole lot of good. That's what happened in Russia you know, and then, when every thing was privatized, the former government crooks became private crooks, so things didn't change all that much. It's like we used to say in the army: "There is nothing wrong with the army, it's the people in it." I don't think that rich people have a monopoly on corruption either, it's just that they do everything on a bigger scale so it makes the news more often.
The bi-cameral legislative system was formulated long before the big western states were carved out of the wilderness. Without it, I don't think that the United States of America would have ever happened. The original 13 colonies each became independent republics after the British pulled out, and I doubt that they would have gotten their act together if they hadn't made this and other compromises. I have said before that, even today, we might be better off with something like the old Articles of Confederation. I suppose, though, that there must have been problems associated with that too or they never would have changed it.
Maybe the only way to have corruption free government is for everybody to become their own sovereign state like the Republic of Beaglesonia. I mean, nobody is going cheat themselves, are they. There is no disaffected minority in Beaglesonia, we rule with the unanimous consent of the citizenry. Corruption is unknown here, we are all honest to a fault. We don't make war on our neighbors, nor do they make war on us. Our revenues are limited, but we live within our means and have been debt free for decades. Why can't everybody be like us?
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