Posted on 02/09/2011 5:24:19 AM PST by Kaslin
Great essay.
Where’s Willi?
I am retarded when it comes to numbers, etc. How do prices give the information? How does one read them? Just asking, for those of you who do get this, I know it’s right, I just want to get it too.
Willie!
I know someone employed by the RR. On Christmas he gets a bonus equal to about a quarter of my annual income.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding your question, but I would offer this example:
If you have a steady job, would you choose to rent a car from Hertz everyday so that you could commute? Or would you purchase a car for yourself? Renting is expensive, so I think you would probably purchase a car. The price gives you the information that owning a vehicle makes more sense than renting one for very frequent use.
Conversely, if you took a business trip to Chicago for a week, would you buy a car when you got to O'Hare? Or would you rent? The price tells you that renting for the week is smarter.
Trains cost billions of dollars and don't really give consumers what they want. That's all the information you need.
I’m still waiting for him to propose a high speed stagecoach.
Pray for America
>> Great essay.
Yeah, it turned out very well, although I was starting to wonder where he was going with the ice skating analogy in an essay about passenger rail.
Prices give information in that they determine a significant portion of the demand for a product. If they're too high for the perceived value no one buys the product, and the company goes out of business. There was a thread last year about some little boutique grocery in boston that went out of business charging $7.00 a dozen for eggs and $60.00 a lb for beef. It made news because th owner publicly blogged that it was the fault of her (mostly nonexistent) customers for failing to appreciate just how special her stuff was. She obviously failed to read the price signal that she was getting from her customers.
"public" ie government transportation is a commodity with a severely distorted price signal. If the fully loaded price were charged no one would ride it, so politicians in order to continue to buy votes of the employees of the enterprise loot taxpayer dollars and bestow them pelf on their "public" transport system. Read Bastiat's what is seen and not seen and consider trains to be like the broken window.
I love riding the train and I think passenger rail should come back, but it has to be commercially feasible (and there are places where it can be). That is, it has to go from one place to another where enough people actually want or need to go, and it has to have enough commercial potential to attract private investment as well.
While people pay for their own individual cars, all our highways, bridges and other automobile infrastructure are paid for by our tax dollars, at one level or another. So I don’t see why it’s worse for this to be the case with trains. There are certainly rail projects that are just pork, but there are also boondoggle roads and bridges to nowhere, built simply to provide pork for a constituency. Both highways and railroads have got to have a real reason for being, and not just as spending projects.
Also, I don’t see why people believe trains and cars are mutually exclusive. Cars and airlines coexist perfectly well, and trains are simply another part of our transportation system, especially now that air travel has become so overloaded and cumbersome. People can use trains for distance travel (and rent a car when they get where they are going, just as air travellers do) or use them to travel into densely populated areas (and take a taxi from the station to their destination, the way people do in New York or most big cities). I don’t see why it’s an either/or.
Increasing prices (P) signal increasing demand (D) from the market. Conversely, decreasing prices signal decreasing demand. Supply adjusts accordingly to meet the demand at a new price point.
I never read the essay, “I, Pencil.” This is truly frightening. We are allowing pencils to be a product of chaos. Overcoming this must be made a top priority.
First we need a federal mandate that all pencil makers be taken over by an appropriate bureaucracy, say, the Department of Education.
Next, all pencilmakers must be federalized immediately. This will insure their permanence. The logical next step is to seperate each of the materials into agencies, one for wood, one for lead, and so forth. A pencil czar will insure that all of these departments work together effectively.
Finally the President must mandate production and control usage. There is substantial waste and fraud of pencils. They are often left unsharpened and children are injured trying to sharpen them with penknives. A special self sharpening pencil for children is required. This is a perfect task for NASA. They certainly do not want all those bits of wood and carbon floating around in a space capsule.
Follow up legislation will be needed to insure that government pencils are required in all hand writing. There will be Tea Party extremists who will call for boycotting government made pencils. To overcome this pens and ballpoints must be outlawed. Indelible pencils will have to be developed, more work for NASA.
The pencil mandate could easily become one of the largest and most effective government bureaucracies, touching every aspect of social communication and private scrivening. With proper legislation, mandates and enforcement pencils can become a source of income to the government surpassing health care.
It is time we recognized the need for central planning for the lowly pencil. Truly it will become a source of pride that the US government knows how to make a pencil.
A huge skating rink from Detroit to Houston? :-)
(We can supply the ice!)
They tell you what people will pay for a service or product. If they won't pay, no matter how marvelous your idea, it probably isn't going to work. And that's valuable information.
Railroads are for freight hauling, period!!! Americans are never going to abandon their cars, the highway system is excellent and the airlines have the nation covered from all sides. Money spent on “high speed rail” is a waste. But, then again, anything Obama does is a total & useless waste!! Just another hateful scheme by POTUS Obama and his anti-American Democrat Party to bring our great country down!!!
Here is the main fact: Passenger Rail in America is dead..
I don’t think I’d want to take a train for everyday commuting. There’s no freedom in it, and there are plenty of stories about people being mugged on commuter trains. When gas prices were so high, I decided to try the park ‘n ride, taking the bus to work. I found that it was tough running errands at luch time and I kept getting sick. Buses are rolling dens of germs.
And so there are practical reasons we prefer our cars. They are safer than public transportation and you don’t have to worry about other passengers coughing on you.
In these hard times wouldn’t it be wonderful if all government doles were in the form of pencils that the recipients could sell? This would provide an immediate boost of 100% employment and end welfare and unemployment with the stroke of an indelible pencil.
The mind boggles.
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