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.
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.
Engineering time, famously reduced to a single variable