Taxpayers should pay for rail if they wish the mine to use rail carts for its transit. Because rail is infrastructure, and the state does infrastructure. That's one of its big jobs. Just as the state should invest in light rail trolleys to carry food from the main railway station to supermarkets in the city centre, if it wants to encourage the supermarkets to use rail to transport their stuff.

Of course, the owners of the mine should pay a property tax for the mine (and for the deposits in it). And since the value of the mine goes up when the railroad is added, that property tax would go up as well.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.