I think we can agree that there is a significant difference in building the railroad or telegraph/gram lines the first time and maintaining it in perpetuity. Also, it’s a lot easier to build and maintain something when it isn’t actively being used and depended on by people. Also, the government doesn’t own infrastructure like railroads, power lines, or telephone lines in most cases. The Federal government paid to have it built the first time, but continued maintenance was supposed to fall on other entities which the government allowed to have a limited monopoly.

Building the railroad the first time so a regulated private monopoly can maintain it is a whole lot different from continually funding and enticing a private company to do best management practices. I’ll totally agree that we shouldn’t have let these monopolies exist in the first place, they should have been publicly run utilities, but that’s in the past and we can’t really change that now.