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.
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).