The airlines are funded by private money, so doesn't that put the airlines at a disadvantage??
By your metric, everything in this country is somehow dependent on government funding.

The airline industry has a gluttony of government taxes and fees attached to every ticket price.

High speed rail is only to a disadvantage to itself. High speed rail is just another way for our government to take more and more control of our taxpayer dollars.
AMTRAK, or National Railroad Passenger Corporation, is government-owned, so all the federal government did was just tip the competitive scale in their favor.
I guess antitrust issues only exist when an airline attempts to be adaptive in the market place.

High speed rail may work in other foreign countries, but their social population demographics are localized and less spread out than ours in the US. The market place has spoken, and the preferential method of travel is by air in the US.


Using taxpayer dollars to finance an industry that has been losing money hand over fist for the last 10 years is just another prime example of waste, pure and simple.
I guess the same could be said about losses sustained in the Airline Sector over the last 10 years, but the difference is that Airlines are not government-owned.

If government-run corporations had to abide by the same competitive rules, ethics, and basic operating practices of the rest of the marketplace, then they would have been put out of business a long time ago.