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.
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!