From Free Markets to Regulation and Back Again: Cycles in Transportation, Grain Marketing, and Economic Thought
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1881, in Bonfield, Ontario, the first spike was driven in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Sir John A. Macdonald immediately predicted that “the CPR can go on its own way for its own interests, and in the long run, the interests of the CPR and those of the Dominion are identical.” CPR President William van Horne, however, expressed a different view when he defined the company’s interest for a U.S. Senate committee. The railway, he said, “was built for the purpose of making money for shareholders and for no other purpose under the sun.” Macdonald’s statement was clearly political. Van Horne’s might be classified as either a fond hope, a PR gambit, or something of a delusion. As historian Gerry Friesen observed: “The CPR was both a privately held, profit oriented corporation and a state enterprise … and when its board of directors, or the Canadian people, ignore the inconvenient half of the dualism, they merely open themselves to greater irritation” (Friesen, 177). Friesen’s comment applies to more than the CPR; most transportation enterprises are partly commercial and partly a public service, and this same dualism runs through the history of grain marketing. Moreover, although we do not recognise it so often, it also runs through economic thought and public policy about free enterprise in general. This paper will trace the way this dualism has manifested itself in both transportation and grain policy in Canada through a very long cycle from free markets to regulation and back, and how this cycle reflects parallel developments in economic theory, public opinion, and government policies, in both Canada and abroad. It ends with some reflections on what might be learned from these remarkable fluctuations in outlook.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".