From Britain:

Train fares double in secret deal by ministers
By Ben Webster, Transport Correspondent

THE Government struck a secret deal with Britain’s biggest train company to double fares on some routes as the cheapest way of reducing overcrowding.

…

A spokesman for the department said: “We accepted that this was a good commercial solution to the problem of overcrowding.”

He admitted that the department had not been as transparent as it could have been but the decision about when to make the increase had been left to First.

Asked whether similar increases would be imposed at South West Trains, the spokesman said: “We are open to any innovative solutions which can reduce overcrowding on SWT.”

Prices might increase in a free market too–if there were significant barriers to increasing the capacity. But you don’t “solve the problem” of more demand for your product than you can supply by increasing the price. You increase the supply! But the socialists seem unable to learn from history. A friend who was in the USSR in the ’80s told me of the long lines of people waiting for toilet paper, sugar, shoes, butter, and just about everything. The demand far, far exceeded the supply yet they could never figure out how to solve the problem.

One of my favorite examples of the failures of government is that the USSR, a socialist system of government, tried for 80 years to increase food production enough to feed their own people. For the last 75 years the U.S., a capitalist society, tried to decrease food production enough for the prices to increase. Both failed.