Link here https://x.com/sfliberty/status/1955774275433976212
Through the mountains, you’d use less steel but massive engineering resources. Around the mountains, you’d use more steel but save engineering for other projects. Both steel and engineering are desperately needed elsewhere for irrigation, trucks, harbors, thousands of other uses.
To choose wisely, you’d need to know what millions of people know. What farmers know about crop yields. What grocers know about customer demand. What truckers know about delivery capacity. What families know about the meals they want to cook tonight.
You’d need surveys of millions. By the time you processed the data, it would be obsolete. Even if people could articulate their preferences accurately, which they often can’t until facing real choices. Ludwig von Mises called this “groping in the dark.”
Now imagine you’re not a commissar, but a railroad CEO in a market economy. Your goal isn’t “the good of the nation” but profit. You calculate costs: engineering hours × price of engineering + steel tons × price of steel. You choose whatever costs less.
Here’s the miracle: By choosing what’s cheapest for your company, you automatically choose what’s best for society. Those market prices you calculated with? They contain the knowledge and preferences of millions of people you’ll never meet.
When customers want better produce, they offer grocers more. Grocers offer farmers more. Farmers offer more for irrigation. Irrigation companies offer engineers more. The price of engineering rises, signaling everyone that this resource just became more valuable.
Prices aren’t just numbers. They’re a distributed intelligence system that coordinates billions of decisions without anyone being in charge. No commissar needed. No surveys required. Just voluntary exchange revealing truth.
This is why socialism always fails and why markets always win. But most college students never learn this. They graduate thinking prices are arbitrary, that central planning could work “if done right.”
Load of shit.
Facts don’t care about your feelings, the Soviet Union objectively was better than the U.S when it came to State-ran railways.
That’s not even touching China.
Here’s the miracle: By choosing what’s cheapest for your company, you automatically choose what’s best for society
They really believe this shit lmao
It’s doubly insane because its not even true in a capitalist society. It’s very well understood that buying cheaper materials may save initial costs but lead to higher long term costs through maintenance and repair.
This is your brain on quarter-by-quarter optimization. Organizations and infrastructure live on the scale of decades. Capitalism more and more lives on the scale of 3 month intervals as the market rewards finance and investment over material. The more financed based, the more quarterly.
Preaching to the choir I know but it amazes me how obvious the flaw is inherent to the way capitalism structures finance and industry in general.
Still the best system though, we can’t do any better than something obviously dysfunctional at a foundational level.
it’s notable that they don’t actually give any examples of soviet railroads here because the USSR wasn’t a real place that actually existed to these people. if it were then you could actually examine it and see how it really did things, instead it is just a cautionary tale, a gulag amimal farm 1984 holodomor thought terminator or thought experiment that you can use to invent failures of socialism
This fundamentally misunderstands that capitalism is planned in the way that he talks about socialism. Corporations do have bureaucracies conducting central planning. They do all of those studies and research on market trends. They exist with unassailable, rigid power and make decisions about what we can and can’t buy, and they don’t offer us things that are good for the economy they offer us things that are good for their profits as they poison us.
Like it’s obvious to all of us here that corporate power is destroying society but this asshole wants to piss on our leg and tell us it’s raining.
I haven’t read it, but The People’s Republic of Walmart is all about corporate central planning.
Mises-folk are trapped in 1920 with a twitter account and an abacus.
Positively misesrable people if you ask them why China is succeeding in damn near every category over the free market-states of America.
Yep, they twist themselves into insufferable knots and claim all of the PRC’s achievements are from markets alone, erasing that it has consistently been the planned aspect of the economy and strong public ownership of the large firms and key industries that has driven the vast majority of its success. The market reforms helped make the growth more consistent, but liberalization entitely would have resulted in a USSR -> RF 2.
Now imagine you’re not a commissar, but a railroad CEO in a market economy. Your goal isn’t “the good of the nation” but profit. You calculate costs: engineering hours × price of engineering + steel tons × price of steel. You choose whatever costs less.
how’s this and all that follows miss to mention any sort of profitability in the calcs. this doesn’t even make sense on it’s own rules, it’d have you building a spiral of railway around the steel plant since that’s probably always the cheapest option
Yeah wait a minute yeah you would subtract that from projected revenue. They don’t even mention that lmao.
Which then opens up the question: “what if the railroad doesn’t actually go very far or help very many people because it’s deemed unprofitable? Wouldnt it have just been better to plan and subsidize it from the start? And then what if that subsidy returns as an investment by way of putting a small tariff on companies that use the rail so you overall boost the productive base of the region, thus creating a wider tax base, this meaning more public utilities, this meaning smaller input costs for the companies around thus making more industry more profitable?”
Or investment. Not having that in the equation is wild too. Attracting investors and convincing them it’ll be profitable is like 80% of capitalism LMAO.
“What if there’s a steel monopoly and it’s not profitable under any circumstances to build it? Not because of resource limitations but because maintaining artificial scarcity and signing deals with select buyers is more profitable for the steel mills?”
“What if there aren’t sufficient engineers because the country doesn’t invest in education? What if it was never profitable enough to be an engineer and everyone went to school for finance?”
If they actually took the math seriously they’d at least honestly arrive at some form of socialized rail to insure public utility, or at least conceding that market regulations and investment capital have to be involved if you don’t do that.
Fucking wild that they think it’s just “some guy buying things” when it comes to the economy.
Imagine you’re everyone fucking else and you just want affordable and reliable transit. Now let’s look at which countries have the most affordable and reliable transi…oh shit oh fuck!
Roller Coaster Tycoon ass economics.
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yawn, this is just the economic calculation problem, its literally like a century old but with AI slop. I’ve heard the exact thing with the steel and engineering a dozen times. You can skin this one a hundred ways with historical economic research, which mostly pokes holes in these assumptions around efficiency.
Here’s a fun response, if the prices have so much “intelligence” in them, why don’t states just use free pricing to run their military logistics? Obviously the units that need ammunition more will pay more right? So why bother with all those dirty socialist logisticians in the general staff tracking and planning all that nonsense?
The best libertarians (the rest are statist cowards) will agree with you and then you can have some fun listening to their ridiculous plans to have field officers pay out their own pocket to fund military research for solutions their niche battlefield conditions, bargaining with truck drivers to make deliveries to your unit in a combat zone or with air and artillery assets to deliver a fire mission to you over another unit in the middle of an offensive, payday loan programs for soldiers at the front so they can buy more equipment before a battle, because yes, all soldiers are paying for all of their equipment and getting paid per operation (to invest them in victory of course).
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Do they think that socialist planning doesn’t involve the exact kind of “market” modeling that they think capitalism uses? Gosplan and Cybersyn were both based on aggregate industrial demand and capacity that allowed for planning out of construction and productive projects using statistical models.
Capitalist statistical modeling is looking at input data from slot machines.
Capitalists; we don’t need trains. We need roads to inefficiently move people and goods individually.
“The customer is always right in matters of taste.”
That preference of an individual is personalized comfort over the common good. This is the tragedy of the commons in overdrive. Of course when given individual input, most individually will prefer an individualized option like cars over trains. This aligns with Capitalism nicely because it’s is also the easier option to sell more profitable units with. Cars appeal to both consumers and Capital. What that equation does not include is the cost to the public good in the forms of water space, public health, lifelong dependency, infrastructure damage to people not using cars, and the ecological catastrophe cars create.
Building the most inefficient transit system possible because it maximizes short term profits with no regard to the wide effects, especially when Capital then uses their wealth to remove competitive public options, is not going to make the best system for the public. We know this from 100+ years of failure generated by the car oriented systems we’ve built into every aspect of our lives.
That preference of an individual is personalized comfort over the common good. This is the tragedy of the commons in overdrive. Of course when given individual input, most individually will prefer an individualized option like cars over trains. This aligns with Capitalism nicely because it’s is also the easier option to sell more profitable units with. Cars appeal to both consumers and Capital.
I think you are right if you’re surveying Americans, but if you detailed the argument, I think most people elsewhere would favor public transit and lighter personal transit (e.g. bike rentals). I don’t think rail systems need to be imposed on people; there were times even in America where railroads were regarded as a grandiose symbol of progress and a great boon to the people.
afaik Tragedy of the Commons is mainly a thought-terminating cliche to defend private property.
Tragedy of the commons (1600s) was just privatization by another name to my recollection
I definitely agree that the balance of attitudes towards more efficient transit is much stronger in countries with stronger community social structure. The US is kind of a special case because of just how individualistic the mentality is. People are incredible selfish in regards to government/centralized solutions to community needs.
The use of bikes, smaller electric vehicles, and personal transportation smaller than cars are all great. I’m a huge (and active) proponent of bike infrastructure and updating city policies to enable personal micro mobility options.
That said, busses can’t solve transit in a major city. They have the same limitations of cars, just with more density (as do trains). Once there’s enough people moving around a region they’re either all walking or you need trains. There’s no better way to use a road-sized piece of land to haul lots of people around. Several cities built separated bus routes for rapid transit in/out of the city core, only to find it locked up in a traffic jam made of only their own busses. They must build trains now because it’s the next step up in the transit hierarchy.
Is that forcing trains on people? I’d say it’s the people forcing trains on themselves because there’s just no other way to move so many people in a dense metropolitan area.
Going places by car requires hours and hours of attentional labor to ensure you don’t kill people and destroy things, and I would rather not do that work, in addition to paying $4000 per year plus $0.50 per mile to have the privilege of doing that work. I would rather be on a fitness/leisure machine that costs $100 per year to own and maintain plus 40 calories per mile.For another $2000 a year I could book all the transit I could possibly want.
I’m right there with you, but we’ve reached a point where generations of people have never seen anything other than cars and airplanes as viable transit. They don’t even know you can live without a car. In their minds it feels physically impossible to travel in any other way for daily life.
I’ve spent years advocating for non-car infrastructure and I’ve had lots of conversations where people just couldn’t believe that anyone other than a destitute person might ride a bus for work or use a bike to get groceries. They driver for everything. Their parents drove for everything and their grandpa drove for everything. Living car free is having to fight generationally ingrained perspectives of the world.
This is a case in point where ideology/indoctrination trumps material interest.
What’s best for
societythe ruling classBtw, I too always just offer my grocers more of my money just to show how much I appreciate their tomatoes. This completely voluntary exchange has nothing whatsoever to do with my need to eat food to continue living.
Deeply unserious.
Communism is when lots of trains
Yes.
Arguing with commies about trains, of all things? These people are… not very intellectual. Building shit tons of rail and obsessing over trains is, like… a giant stereotype about communists. Like, that’s one of the things we’re known for, is building infrastructure, especially public transportation, at incredible rates, and there’s a stereotype that the best way to get around any given socialist state or communist controlled region is to simply ride the train, rail networks tend to be very extensive when infrastructure is centrally planned by folks focused on improving society.
As a CEO, I immediately realise selling every single person one or more superfluous unnecessary 2.5 tonne metal boxes with engines will make me a shitton more money (despite being enormously inefficient and destroys all life on Earth). Therefore I do that, make everyone’s lives worse, and fuck over the planet.
Huh, trains? Yeah they may insanely more efficient, raise quality of life, save the planet, go faster, cheaper to run, easy to maintain, and the cheapest form of transport once you factor in externalised costs. But there’s no profit in trains - building those only makes sense if you’re doing societal good. Not my thing.
Now implement some more subsidies and government road building for my new ELECTRIC 2.5 tonne metal boxes!
How come nobody’s trying to bully me for making a repost?
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Good enough content to have two posts
Technically it’s a crosspost
imagine
Oh, so we’re in an invented reality not a historical one
Right? We have real-world examples of communists building trains (notably China) while capitalists have train derailments every 6 months where they accidentally blow up a town. And there’s no public transit anywhere and sure as shit not passenger trains.
“If you ignore reality and facts, my argument is perfect.”
