Posted on 02/09/2011 5:24:19 AM PST by Kaslin
You are our Ruler. An entrepreneur tells you he wants to create something he calls a "skating rink." Young and old will strap blades to their feet and speed through an oval arena, weaving patterns as moods strike them.
You'd probably say, "We need regulation -- skating stoplights, speed limits, turn signals -- and a rink director to police the skaters. You can't expect skaters to navigate the rink on their own."
And yet they do. They spontaneously create their own order.
At last month's State of the Union, President Obama said America needs more passenger trains. How does he know? For years, politicians promised that more of us will want to commute by train, but it doesn't happen. People like their cars. Some subsidized trains cost so much per commuter that it would be cheaper to buy them taxi rides.
The grand schemes of the politicians fail and fail again.
By contrast, the private sector, despite harassment from government, gives us better stuff for less money -- without central planning. It's called a spontaneous order.
Lawrence Reed, of the Foundation for Economic Education, explains it this way:
"Spontaneous order is what happens when you leave people alone -- when entrepreneurs ... see the desires of people ... and then provide for them.
"They respond to market signals, to prices. Prices tell them what's needed and how urgently and where. And it's infinitely better and more productive than relying on a handful of elites in some distant bureaucracy."
This idea is not intuitive. Good things will happen if we leave people alone? Some of us are stupid -- Obama and his advisers are smart. It's intuitive to think they should make decisions for the wider group.
"No," Reed responded. "In a market society, the bits of information that are needed to make things work -- to result in the production of things that people want -- are interspersed throughout the economy. What brings them together are forces of supply and demand, of changing prices."
Prices are information.
The personal-computer revolution is a great example of spontaneous order.
"No politician, no bureaucrat, no central planner, no academic sat behind a desk before that happened, before Silicon Valley emerged and planned it," Reed added. "It happened because of private entrepreneurs responding to market opportunities. And one of the great virtues of that is if they don't get it right, they lose their shirts. The market sends a signal to do something else. When politicians get it wrong, you and I pay the price.
"We have this engrained habit of thinking that if somebody plans it, if somebody lays down the law and writes the rules, order will follow," he continued. "And the absence of those things will somehow lead to chaos. But what you often get when you try to enforce mandates and restrictions from a distant bureaucracy is planned chaos, as the great economist Ludwig on Mises once said. We have to rely more upon what emerges spontaneously because it represents individuals' personal tastes and choices, not those of distant politicians."
Another way to understand spontaneous order is to think about the simple pencil. Leonard Read, who established the Foundation for Economic Education, wrote an essay titled, "I, Pencil," which began, "(N)o single person on the face of this earth knows how to make (a pencil)."
That sounds absurd -- but think about it. No one person can make a pencil. Vast numbers of people participate in making the materials that become a pencil: the wood, the brass, the graphite, the rubber for the eraser, the paint and so on. Then go back another step, to the people who make the saws and machinery that are used to make the materials that go into a pencil. And before that, people mine iron to make the steel that makes the machines that make the materials that go into a pencil. It's all without central direction, without these people even knowing they are all working ultimately to make pencils. Thousands of people mining, melting, cutting, assembling, packing, selling, shipping -- and yet you can buy pencils for a few pennies each.
That's spontaneous order, and it's replicated with every product we buy, no matter how complex.
The mind boggles.
What good are passenger trains if they go through areas hundreds of miles away from where you live?
I live on the Front Range, and we have a govt-subsidized bus service between Denver and Colorado Springs that has very few customers, Someone calculated that it would be cheaper just to buy a car for each of the regular passengers than to continue the service.
A year ago the CS Gazette had an article about a Denver panhandler who bought a daily bus ticket to take him from liberal Denver to the very conservative town of Monument, because the conservatives in Monument were a lot more “liberal” with their cash that the liberals in Denver.
I agree. I lived in the city of Boston for 20 years, and I got around just fine on the subways -- they did shut down before midnight, and that was often inconvenient, but subways were fine for travel inside the city.
Then I moved out to the suburbs. There was a real train station in my town, and I did commute into Boston via train for a few years, but it was awful. If I worked a few minutes late, I would miss my usual train and have to wait 2 hours to catch the next one. If I had a meeting 30 minutes before my usual start time, I would have to show up 2 hours early. The train schedule ruled my life. No thanks!
When will liberals learn that many of us don’t ever want to be in close proximity to their constituents.
I have always despised public transportation, the transportation is fine, it’s the public that’s the problem!
Part of this is post-Davos claptrap. The big Euro and Japanese train making companies exerting influence on a very gullible social group — the super rich.
Also, keep in mind terrorist can’t put bombs on a “cloud”,
but they would have all that track to leave their handy work on.
Supposedly by the so-called highway trust fund funded by fuel taxes. IE. That means the people who use them are the ones who pay for them. This is NOT the case for trains. People who never set foot on one are being forced to pay for them.
So I don’t see why it’s worse for this to be the case with trains
If you don't see the difference between using tax dollars for something that's used by 95% of the population and paid for by those who use it contrasted with something that is used by 1/100th of a percent of the population yet paid for by those who don't use it, then I don't think anything anyone says here will enlighten you.
People can use trains for distance travel (and rent a car when they get where they are going, just as air travellers do)
Wrong. Last time I looked there were no car rental agencies or significant parking at train stations. To compare trains to air travel is especially dishonest since you can usually go by car faster than you can by train. Particularly when you factor in all of the stops that trains make for no apparent reason. So let me see.
While I think a true self-supporting train system might work the way you envision, I’m just not sure it is feasible in the US.
I remember being quite impressed with the public transport systems in Europe. You could take a bus from your home to the train station, ride the train, then take another bus to your destination. The busses and trains always seemed to be well filled (if not outright packed). But then, in France and England, where I had those experiences, there are no vast regions of little or no population such as we have in the US. Every mile of track costs a certain amount to maintain; while it may be cost effective to run a train between major towns/cities that are maybe 50 miles apart, when the towns/cities are hundreds of miles apart, the cost rises significantly.
lol
True. And think of how massive a wreck that a train moving 80 mph would have if the track is blown, and very easily done so at that.
Can you imagine the mess, if all the people who currently drive, suddenly had to start taking a train to commute or travel?
For one, there is no way that the rail/train system could handle the load. There would be waiting lines and lists spanning weeks, even months ahead.
Trains are fine if you are a Policy Wonk going from Point A to Point B. But yesterday I had to go from Point A to Point B to Point C to point D and back to Point A. Point C was a Food Bank and if I had taken the train yesterday I would not have been able to take the food on the train and if even I had, it would have defrosted. And then there’s golf before work in the Summer.
It took three hours to go to a place that would’ve taken 30 minutes by car. The other riders were obnoxious and possibly criminals looking for a crime.
The bus station was a cross between something from Mad Max, Escape from New York, and a documentary about crime in Detroit (we’re not in not that city, but you get the idea). It was going to be a 50 minute wait at the bus station for the next inefficient bus, so we decided to walk to remaining 3 miles home.
Riding the train in another city was only a little better.
Maybe things were better 60 years ago when people acted more like humans rather than the animals that public schools tell them they are.
I’ll keep my car thank you.
Yes and do you remember hearing him in his speech, saying something about and we wouldn’t have to be patted down and then he laughed? Which made no sense at all...what an idiot!!
I take that makes no sense at all back...
We wouldn’t need to be patted down because the bombers would be on the track not on the train. How silly of me.
the stroke of an indelible pencil.
Oh sure, wipe out the eraser industry in a single stroke.
Unintended consequences...empty factories, rubber trees
untended, guys beside the highway with signs,
“Will erase for food!”.
It’s in the nature of the beast, or liberal, to believe that government can solve any problem...even when it doesn’t exist. In theory, high speed rail sounds like a great idea. But what if it’s not needed? Never mind say the liberals, full steam ahead with these light rail lines that will waste billions of tax dollars and few will use.
They’ve brought the commuter rail to Austin, TX this year. Ha, what a freakin’ joke. No one wanted it but Gov. Perry forced it on us. It rides along side the highway so you can see inside the cars... make that the very empty cars. Perry also brought us the toll road last year. Personally, I can’t see it’s helped anything. Some like it but there’s no where I need to go that I can’t skirt around it with equal drive time and save my $$$.
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