Free Republic

<p>COHOES, N.Y. — In its 19th-century heyday, pioneers, immigrants and cargo swarmed the Erie Canal, a bustling gateway that opened up the country's heartland and the West. When the canal faded from prominence at the turn of the past century, a myth arose that it had been destroyed.</p>

With little income generated by the canals themselves — recreational revenue is about $165,000 a year, commercial only $40,000 — the cost of operating them is now covered largely with highway tolls collected by the Thruway Authority. And the roughly $55 million operating budget for the canals accounted for a large chunk of the $78.5 million in losses the authority reported during the 2014 fiscal year. On top of that are annual capital investments in the tens of millions of dollars to maintain and improve the system. The burden falls largely on highway toll-payers because of a decision in 1992...

Elizabeth Warren, running for the US Senate in Massachusetts as (what else?) a Democrat, recently let fly with a little indignant speech which was supposed to serve notice to all of the hicks in flyover country of the essential moral superiority of the Eastern, statist position:There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you!But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were...