> How does one compete with a canal like the Suez? Aircraft, railroads, slow- and superslow steaming, and supertankers come to mind. The latter two are variant

> How does one compete with a canal like the Suez? Aircraft, railroads, slow- and superslow steaming, and supertankers come to mind. The latter two are variants of "go the long way around". The high-speed railway to Eilat is an example of the second form of competition. > The profit isn't actually encouraging much competition here I don't understand. Are you complaining that the profit isn't enough, because it doesn't encourage enough competition? I thought you were arguing that the profit was too high. > This kind of rent extraction isn't good for countries like Egypt either This sounds like the language of an ex-colonial power tsk-tsking at one of its ex-colonies. Are your proposed alternatives to the existing situation also is this vein? Are you arguing against nationalization, and that it would be better for Egypt if the Suez Canal Authority were re-privatized and/or put under more foreign control, like the Suez Canal Company was? How would that help "the public"? I'll be a bit more specific - what does "like Egypt" mean? Are you making an argument about economics, or an argument about your political preferences? We need only compare the UK and Norway to see how a difference in politics in how to handle the North Sea oil has a big difference in economic outcomes. Egypt's politics are far more different than either of those. Your complaint sounds more like you want to deny revenue to governments you don't like, rather than an indication that the rent seeking is a causative agent. (Surely US military support of the Egyptian government doesn't help, as does ex-colonianism, so it's not simple to deconvolve the different factors.) So let's lift it out of recent politics. Was Denmark "like Egypt" when Eric of Pomerania imposed the Sound Dues on Øresund traffic? "By this he secured a large stable income for his kingdom that made it relatively rich and which made the town of Elsinore flowering." says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_of_Pomerania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_of_Pomerania , to the displeasure of the Hanseatic League. By the 1800s it was clearly a bad idea, but was it a bad idea even in 1500?