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.
When customers want better produce, they go to a different grocery store unless they are one of 6% of the population that lives in a food desert or 11% who live below the catastrophicly low "poverty line" or work multiple jobs and just have one store between work and home that your available free time will permit visiting.
For those more well off, we immediately realise there is no mechanism to "offer grocers more" in exchange for anything cause your choices are limited to what the grocer supplies. You can go to a different grocer which is more expensive, but what incentive does that grocer have to willing part with their extra money when they pay the same as the first store for an identical box of CheezIts?
If some extra money does make it to the farmers why are they not spending the absolute minimum on irrigation so they can either pocket the rest or (perhaps more realistically) send it to John Deere for the privilege of having their tractor repaired (again).
Money don't flow down to people doing work; it flows up to people who get to choose their own salaries.
I'm pretty sure the country that was first to space, first to satellites, first to orbit, first animal in space, first man in space, first woman in space, first to space walk, first space station, first lander on the moon, first lander on mars, first lander on Venus and the producers of (at the time) the largest unified railway system in the world could figure out how to build a railway.
Also it turns out that the needs of people and thus the needs of societies are the same regardless of how strong the profit motive is.
There's no mountains on the way to space that you need to plan around
If people like a product more than another, they signal this by... consuming more of it. There is no other feedback with the grocery store. The only thing that grocery store can measure on the consumer side is the rate of consumption.
This, of course, is completely unlike a planned economy, because in that case, the only thing a distributor can measure is rate of consumption! /s