From an editorial in the Dec. 27, 1906 NYT:

Our inquiries at the country's traffic centres did not reveal any single cause of the shortage of cars which is annoying every railway, every shipper, and every consumer of anything transported by railway. The unfeeling railway men seem to think that there is nothing to do but to work out of the congestion as best as we may, but down at Washington the wise men know better than that. The true remedy is to give power to the wise and strong man who are charged, it is true, with other matters, but who would have not objection to taking charge of any other small jobs which are badly attended to.

In other words, the supply of railway services, specifically the capacity of railway cars, seems to be less than the demand for railway services. This, in turn, has created a shortage for which there seems to be two options: let the private sector deal with the problem or give the solution to the program to the "wise men" of the government.

The editorial goes on:

The President has taken up the subject with the Inter-State Commerce Commission and has asked them to draft drastic remedial legislation giving them power..."to compel any railroad to forward an adequate number of cars to any point at any time of emergency." This is thorough, but too slow for Senator Hansrough's taste. He is to the force with a project of law "to compel the railroads to anticipate extraordinary movements of commodities, and to take care of such shipments when they are offered."

In something that would seemed to have come from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, one branch of the Federal government proposes to compel private companies to respond to "emergencies" with an "adequate number of cars." Who is to define an emergency and who is to define adequate? The implication is the "wise men" of the ICC will take care of those definitions, thank you very much.

But another branch of government tops the other with proposed legislation that requires railroads to "anticipate extraordinary movements of commodities."
Yet, how can a lack of "anticipation" be made illegal? The NYT editorial board asks the same question, albeit tongue-in-cheek:

These are excellent remedies. The only defect is that they are to be applied solely to the railways. It would be derisory to suggest that Congress should pass an act enabling, or rather "compelling," all of us to be foresighted and forehanded. We would not make any such absurd suggestion as that, but recommend only that the Inter-State Commerce Commission, or the President, or both, should have power over all directly concerned. On Christmas Day, for instance, there were 14,000 cars idle at Galveston because shippers would not unload them. Is it not clear that the situation would be relieved if the Inter-State Commerce Commission had authority to order every shipper to provide himself with storage facilities adequate to enable him to take the goods out of the cars and turn them back for other loads?

The NYT pokes fun at the idea that the government should be able to compel private firms to not only formulate accurate expectations but to act upon them for the betterment of others, with no regard for the profitability of doing so.
The editorial finally zeroes in on the major problem of the "wise men" solution, long before Hayek, Mises, or Rand put pen to paper:

There can be one objection. If the Commission orders everybody else to be foresighted who will enforce the order? We are not aware that the Commission had placed itself upon record as ordering now what it would order for the next emergency.

This is exactly the post-Katrina criticism many levelled against FEMA. The editorial slams the door shut on the "wise men" solution with a penetrating logic we could only hope those in the halls of Congress would employ:

We heartily favor making everybody foresighted and competent by law, but we are a little anxious about the detail of making those issuing the orders themselves foresighted and competent.