Alright then it would be a serious misallocation of funds. I’m not saying that connecting people from small towns to big cities is a silly thing for the government to do, but going with the most expensive option of doing so definitely is. The government right now operates the essential air service which does basically what you said, connects people in small towns to big cities, and it does it for over 150 small towns across the U.S.. every day as a public service. However, the EAS only spends about 350 million a year total in subsidies to these routes.

Like I said before for a 50 mile stretch of track its 5 billion with a lot of benefits of the doubt, which is over 14x that, for one single small route. Spending that for say all EAS routes, which again I’ll round out to 50 miles for each even though most are going to be significantly longer is 795 billion dollars. So sure if you want that high speed rail for the small towns to the big cities go for it, but just throw away pretty much all of the defense budget for the year on a single public service very few people are going to use hedging your bets that people will come, and that jobs won’t dry up in those cities super quickly.

You act like government aren’t economic entities. No amount of nationalization or socialism breaks you from being an economic entity. From North Korea to the U.S., money is still king. We can’t go wasting millions on expensive projects that can be done cheaper and pretty much just as conveniently.