The news out of Spain this morning is the kind that turns your stomach over your first cup of black coffee. Sixty-eight human beings, gone in a heartbeat of twisted steel and shattered glass, because one high-speed train barreled into another that was sitting dead on the track ahead of it. Before the dust had even settled or the families had been notified, the Spanish transport minister took to the cameras to offer up the official verdict. It was, he said, an "inexplicable" error. Whenever a high-ranking bureaucrat uses that particular word to describe a catastrophic failure on his watch, it is time for common-sense folks to keep one hand on their wallets and both eyes on the exit.
To the laptop class and the planners who drift through the corridors of Brussels and Washington, high-speed rail has long been treated less like transportation and more like a holy sacrament. For decades, Americans who prefer the freedom of an open highway and a reliable pickup truck have endured lectures from coastal editorial boards. We are told to look across the Atlantic to see the future: sleek, silent trains gliding through the countryside, untroubled by traffic or human messiness, run by enlightened state planners who supposedly have it all figured out. It is an article of faith among the green-energy crowd that if we only surrendered our independence to mass transit, we would arrive in a cleaner, better-ordered world.
Out here in the heartland, from the factory floors of Ohio to the diner booths of eastern Iowa, people know better than to put their absolute trust in sweeping promises made by men who never get dirt under their fingernails. Edmund Burke, the great philosopher of conservative prudence, warned us more than two centuries ago about the folly of the "sophisters, calculators, and economists." He knew that whenever a political class imagines it can reorganize human life with mathematical precision, it forgets the one thing that never changes: human nature is deeply, inherently fallible.
A high-speed train traveling at nearly two hundred miles an hour is an impressive piece of modern engineering, to be sure. But it is not a miracle. It is a machine designed by men, built by men, and regulated by men. When you concentrate thousands of lives into a centralized, hyper-complex network, you also concentrate the risk. A flat tire on a country road is an inconvenience; a breakdown on a suburban street is a tow truck call. But when a centralized rail system suffers a breakdown, and when the electronic safeguards fail to communicate what any track worker with a red lantern could have seen a century ago, the result is an absolute slaughter. You cannot engineer away human error with a computer terminal and an endless stream of public subsidies.
Here at home, the political establishment has been itching to pour hundreds of billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars into their own European-style rail networks. We need only look at the boondoggle in California to see the domestic version of this fantasy: billions of dollars over budget, years behind schedule, and still not a single passenger carried between the destinations they promised. Yet the push continues, driven by an ideological belief that the individual behind the steering wheel must be replaced by the commuter in the passenger car. They promise efficiency and safety, but the margin for error at these speeds is zero. When the system blinks, the consequences are catastrophic.
What the technocrats call "inexplicable" is actually the most predictable thing in the world: the failure of complex bureaucracy to account for real life. It means the spreadsheets were immaculate, the PowerPoint slides were persuasive, and the press releases were printed on fine paper, but reality intervened. Centralized planners always believe their systems are foolproof right up until the moment disaster strikes. Then, suddenly, the tragedy becomes an anomaly, an act of God, or an inexplicable quirk of fate that somehow demands even more public funding and more state authority to fix.
We ought to pray for the souls lost in Spain and for the families left with an empty chair at the kitchen table tonight. But we should also take this grim moment to reject the naive utopianism that dominates modern politics. Technology has given us many blessings, but it has not made us angels, and it has not made our governments infallible. True prudence means respecting the limits of what centralized planning can achieve and remembering that the grander the bureaucratic scheme, the higher the price when it inevitably fails.