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 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.

Mises-folk are trapped in 1920 with a twitter account and an abacus.

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

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).

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.

What's best for ~~society~~ the ruling class

Btw, 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.

Capitalists; we don't need trains. We need roads to inefficiently move people and goods individually.

Communism is when lots of trains

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?

imagine

Oh, so we're in an invented reality not a historical one

Here's the miracle: By choosing what's cheapest for your company, you automatically choose what's best for society.

Found the unfalsifiable dogma at the center of the ideology. Do I get a treat?

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.

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.

Conservatives love their abstract thought experiments. You can always tell you're in for some bullshut when they start talking in the abstract without any evidence.

Here's how making people fear for their lives because of profit motives is actually better than central planning that constructs a railroad with safety and people's needs in mind

The ai slop image is so bad is the guy going to get run over by the train??? What is this composition, why is there a faded piss filter.

Anyway this post is valuable in that it is exactly how liberals conceptualize capital and the economy. Ive heard variations of this exact argument from techbros all the time.

So the theory they're expounding here (it's Hayek) does actually have some merit imho — it's just that they've chosen the single stupidest example imaginable. The information problem is why cybernetics became a thing, and one of the exciting things about this historical moment is that the problem seems to have been solved by the huge progress we've seen in computing.

Infrastructure projects however need long term planning by definition lol.

You're a Soviet railroad commissar. No markets. No prices. Just you and a mountain range between two cities. How do you decide where to build?

Leonid Kantorovich:

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.

But who cares? I built a box that pushes a button which pushes another button which pushes another and the information of my input (that I pushed the first button) turns on a light at the end. It's a system! wow. what does the existence of the system have to say about the usefulness of the system? where is that information embedded? Just because you can engineer a solution, and that solution does something, doesn't mean it is the perfect solution that should exist. I created a system that turns on a light. Do we need a light? Is there a darkness problem? Is the light bright enough to solve the problem? Is it useful if we have to create 50 more of those button-light chains to light up an area? Who gets to push the first button that turns on the light? Do we really need a chain of buttons to do the task of one button?

Also lolberts: The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent

Somehow this doesn't factor into railroads too apparently

Of course they use AI art. But also, I thought libertarians hated trains because they think they are somehow less "efficient" than thousands and thousands of cars, so it's no surprise they think that building railways is a bad thing.

Leftists literally obsess over trains. In fact it's probably a major pipeline.

You laugh, but on this forum there are also people that argue that price is a coherent and linear signal and a result of a fully optimized process, instead of an arbitrary assertion of a power relation.

Lmao dumbass question

Capitalism invented engineering (the building stuff kind)