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.
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.