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Uh, I assume I survey the land to find the pass that's the least steep and treacherous. Yah know kinda like how railroad engineers do under capitalism.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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kinda like how railroad engineers do under capitalism
Not quite though. After the treacherousness calculation, you must take into account whether the route will be profitable (if you're taking passengers and charging them), or whether enough resources can be exploited from the mine it connects with the harbor to make it profitable (no passengers allowed).
Pretty sure a libertarian 'train system' would just be a scam designed to get as much money as possible before whatever 'company' the money was going towards is shuttered by ownership
Well you'd still have to factor building costs in terms of time and resources but yeah basically
Do they think price signals are going to tell you which ways the mountains turn and the optimal path through the range? Not geological and topological survey and civil engineering? This is advanced Mises-thought.
Do they think
no
I mean I look at the tweet and think they shouldn't have built the railroad going into the torso of the big guy
How about this, you're a goofy propagandist on Twitter and need an image for your tweet. Do you find an appropriate image or do you type malformed thoughts into an AI so it gives you visual gibberish?
If they don't have to make profit there is no incentive for planners to not be lazy and just put a random line somewhere, ignoring the experts, even if it doesn't make sense./s
Socialist states famously do not build railroads
Damn someone better tell that to China's 48,000 km of high speed rail.
Actually since the free market in California failed to build high speed rail that just proves that trains are inefficient and cars are superior you see public infrastructure's contribution to the economy is difficult to quantify so therefore it is more efficient for an economist to simply assume it doesn't exist just like how they assume that externalities don't exist and assume that any profit made by a profit seeking venture is an instant and perfectly accurate reflection of the value of that venture's contribution to society
its spherical cows all the way down
This is beside the point. China is building amazing railways, yes - but at what cost.
You'd need surveys of millions. By the time you processed the data, it would be obsolete
For laying train tracks? You can talk about it taking too long, but train tracks are not something that become obsolete in a week.
Also, the issue isn't processing the data nearly as much as gathering it. This person is living in a world where the best computer is an abacus or a guy you hired to do the math for you. Also, some of the examples like "what people want to cook for dinner that night" are also not things that you can fucking wring out of the market more quickly than in a planned economy that uses even a moderate degree of modern technology.
Even if people could articulate their preferences accurately, which they often can't until facing real choices.
What happened to freedom? So we're actually supposed to decide for them? And what the fuck are "real choices"? Is a referendum not a real choice? Is a survey that will use the aggregate results to make decisions about food shipments not a real choice? Why is it only a real choice when it's one of 50 cereal flavors or the only hospital in the city that takes my insurance?
These people are just fucking technocrats like everyone else.
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.
I agree, CEOs in market economies do choose whatever costs less (unless it's something to pump stocks or pad executive salaries, which is admittedly a lot), and look where that got us! All the skeleton crews, just-in-time supply chains and so on lead to the country completely fucking imploding when Covid hit and over a million people died, millions more have been seriously disabled, and the whole fucking country has been instructed to ignore getting progressively more crippled by successive infections until it kills us too. And that's saying nothing about cost-cutting also causing no shortage of immediate death, disability, and people living in misery and hardship when it's probably more economically efficient from a broad view to not subject them to that. Amazon wage-slaves are a direct product of this approach.
Just optimizing for minimum immediate cost is a bad strategy for public infrastructure, and indeed can be without exaggeration a genocidal strategy.
There's a lot of information involved in price-signaling, but the specific nature of that information and the motives that a CEO works on when interacting with those prices are not geared even remotely toward the public good. This person can only justify their claim by likening it to a miracle, because there is no reasonable mechanistic way to reach their conclusion.
Here's the miracle: By choosing what's cheapest for your company, you automatically choose what's best for society
My god they're really huffing their own farts.
Yeah I love eating food that has been adulterated with chemicals illegal to feed to animals elsewhere because it was cheaper. I can tell it really helps society too.
as always when reading liberal literature, "people" means "rich people", "society" means "business interests", "good" means "profitable", "cheapest" means "cheapest in the short term, for me, personally", "liberty" means "no rules for daddy CEO" etc. etc.
these people literally think prices are an Arcane Force. prices are set by humans. pumped up by endless layers of middlemen taking cuts. monopolies everywhere.
i don't even know how anyone could take this seriously anymore i mean look at the tariff shit. just made up numbers, bam, prices explode. there is no Market Force
libertarian "economists" not beating the high priest of capital allegations
And the liberals treat the USSR as the be all and end all of communism, discuss the Cold War like it was a Crusade, treat communism as a Slavic ethnoreligion, and all the old "Godless Commies" nonsense reads like theocrats screaming about an opposing theocracy.
Ahh, neoliberals. Every accusation is a confession. Even the accusations they don't fully understand or realise they're making.
You calculate costs: engineering hours × price of engineering + steel tons × price of steel
...and you've left aside all externalities that don't matter to your profit: Economic benefits from joining high population-density urban areas or industries, environmental impact, social cost of nationalization (how will you as a private company nationalize the land for the railroad?)... Now you have a society where there's a disconnect between the providers of a necessary service as transport, and its users. Efficient as FUCK.
Best of all possible worlds
The USSR built railroads so quickly and effectively that they (1) surprised the Nazi generals so much they wrote about all the railways not on their own maps and of the industrial capacity they faced and (2) they transported entire industries East so they could operate away from the front.
Meanwhile, the US has dismantled most of its railway system because it lacks central planning, so railways that don't directly earn a profit (e.g. from moving freight) become derelict.
It gets even funnier.
In Amerikka, rail lanes that literally turn a profit are actively shut down because it makes the profit % line go up. By removing the smaller margin profit earners, it leaves only large margin profit earners remaining so the % goes up.
This is not a joke. They would literally rather have a higher % of profit next quarter, even if it means making fewer total dollars of profit.
This had the completely unknowable results of increasing prices for consumers and manufacturers alike, and putting more semi trucks on the road increasing congestion/pollution/collisions.
Truly capitalism is capable of miracles that communist engineers could only dream of.
Capitalists are often very bad at capitalism. On average they maximize profit, not just percent profit, but if you hire enough MBAs anything can happen.
science has yet to discover an organism dumber than the average libertarian
I checked the thread, it's just the calculation problem again.
Ludwig von Mises called this "groping in the dark".
"Students for Liberty"?! Yet another sugar-daddy-funded campus group debasing the 501c3 laws. Anyone remember the Chapo episode where they did a reading from "Leisa", one of the "writers" from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)? It had the same basic tone as this tweet: phoned-in, zero standards, etc. This is really embarrassing--can you imagine being a middle-aged chud at one of these "think" tanks, cranking out this kind of chronic, grinding mediocrity?
found my "Leisa" post: https://hexbear.net/comment/5293491
They actually worship the invisible hand. Insane.
I think they are perfectly sane. They've just bought into this.
And these people claim communists make an economic system into a religion.
I seem to remember "learning" about the invisible hand of the market, I assume most people in the west are subjected to this? So why do they claim this is not the case? I think it's more likely that some people might see this explanation for what it is: a spiritual force decides who hungers and who lives in luxury. Then you can choose to believe in the morality of this, like the monarchs did.
I'm pulling this out of my ass, because it's just a random thought. The "price signals" are doomed to be imperfect. People are only able to put in more "consumption" signals, if they have the funds to do so. Once out of money, all their other needs go not only unmet, but also "un-signalled". There has never been a situation where everyone was able to put in all of their signalling. Is it even possible?
On the other hand, people who have more funds than they can ever spend, put in inflated signals for dumb shit noone needs. Great fucking miracle you got there. I guess the rail leads directly from Bezos house to the fuckin airport and nowhere else. Who's gonna feed the children?
Adam Smith's original term, best that I recall, was "the Invisible Hand of Providence"; so it's always been spiritualist bullshit
I think you've definitely got part of it with the signalling thing. It's also worth noting that people can only really spend money on what is available to purchase, and that their depiction of profit completely whitewashes issues of parasitic middle-men, regulatory capture, pumping stocks, and so on.
Under capitalism you would just ask an AI where to put it.
Hold on this AI keeps telling me to demolish black communities, let me try asking it again
Ghost (of Robert Moses) in the Shell
Marx failed to consider railroad tycoon simulator.
Population density and military importance lmao
Hey…your precious “geniuses” failed to build any rail no matter how much economists endorse doing so.
Oh wait I forgot every ”let’s replace da gubmint with corporashunz!” thinks they’re all PhDs in economics and then they call us elitists for daring to not put our blind faith in quasi-monarchs.
We've been losing against these dumb ass holes for a century, and they're still pushing the same tired propaganda. I hate this timeline.
What the fuck is he steering?
It looks like the torso of a 50 foot tall man traveling sideways on a handcar in front of that locomotive.
Imagine if capitalists could capture the additional economic benefit from a more connected society. The railroads could be able to sue individuals who started a business as a result of taking the train. Of course these people should have insurance to safeguard them as long as they properly reported how the idea came up.