Rail monopolies destroyed the American supply chain

Heads they win, tails we lose.

Cory Doctorow
5 min readFeb 4, 2022

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A vintage editorial cartoon depicting a giant squid labeled ‘Railroad Monopoly’ with various things being strangled in its tentacles: a ship, a coach, a farmer and his horses, a miner, a telegraph delivery boy, a winemaker, lumberjacks, a produce farmer, etc. The octopus’s eyes are the bearded faces of two forgotten railbarons.

The rail barons were the original monopolists, whose ability to make or break whole industries based on their parochial needs spurred the first American antitrust laws. For generations, railroads were tightly regulated to ensure resiliency, competition and fairness. Today, the monopolists are back, and their greed has…

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