Almost any time there is an accident in a business, we soon hear the statists saying, “That’s just what you can expect when greedy, profit-seeking business people run things.” But governmentally operated things are at least as prone to accidents. Yesterday there was a serious one on the Washington Metro. One person died from smoke inhalation at the L’Enfant station.

Writing about this on Cato@Liberty, Walter Olson asks,”If the cream of the nation’s political class, living within a 50 mile radius in Virginia, Maryland, and D.C., cannot arrange to obtain competence from their elected local officials in delivering a public service that’s vital to their daily work lives, what does that tell us about their pretentions to improve through federal action the delivery of local government services — fire and police, water supply and schooling, road maintenance and, yes, transit itself — in the rest of the country?”

Answer: it tells us that we should ignore them.