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.
>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.
The money for federal highway projects comes from the gasoline tax. Hence the drivers are paying for the roads and infrastructure they use (we don’t need to get into the disproportionate wear and tear inflicted by commercial trucks, suffice it to say they get subsidized).
The passenger rail system (Amtrak) is heavily subsidized by people who don’t use the system at all. That money comes from the general fund, and even if you’ve never seen an Amtrak train in your life, you still pay.
The price you are willing to pay for something indicates how much you are willing to sacrifice to have it (other things you could buy, savings, time spent to earn the money). The price someone is willing to sell something for indicates how much they are willing to sacrifice to provide it to you (time used to supply the thing, etc). When their price is higher than you are willing to pay, you don't buy and he doesn't sell (The product may not even exist). When your price is above his price, commerce happens.
CCG — I am very disappointed in you. You did not adjust your life to the needs of the State. You will be a prime target for re-education.
How ‘bout car service?
You show up at the train station, hand the keys to a valet, wait an hour in a lounge at the station, then board a comfortable, elegant train. You ride for hours or even days, get to the destination, wait for an hour in a lounge at the station, walk out and the valet has your car waiting.
If its no more expensive than a plane ticked, I’d be all over it...
Except that even there drivers are cheated. The highway trust fund is frequently plundered by politicians to pay for "public transportation" projects (ie pork to pay off their donors)
[only one track for 2 N/S trains]
2. ~~ Vermont `` `` = 12 mph
[not including bus trip from below border into Canada]
Govt to rename Amtrak = OffTrack
Amtrack already has that service but only from DC to Orlando. Google the car train. Kind of hard to figure out the cost since there a number of options.
I took a train from Boston to Chicago about twenty-five years ago...kids screaming all the way; running upand down the aisles. NEVER, NEVER again...unless I am forced onto one at gunpoint in the near future.
“Obama said America needs more passenger trains. How does he know?”
Good question. The man can’t drive a car, so why would his opinion of cars vs trains be valid?
If libs want trains so much, why do they continue to make individual transport even more cost-effective by mandating that the cost per mile driven go down by virtue of CAFE laws? We make cars cheaper to use, then sit back and wonder why...... A)We use MORE gasoline, B)People move en masse to the suburbs (sprawl), and C)Taxpayers continue to have to subsidize AMTRAK because demand drops due to increased use of the motor vehicle!
When he and the first wookie go someplace they even travel with their own furniture and multiple backup limousines (all presidents have for some time) His appreciation of the daily needs of us peons is nonexistent.
the long term objective by city planners is to FORCE people into trains. Confiscatory regulation and presto cars are defacto outlawed.
Being a science dweeb I liken it to the Heisenberg principle - you can measure anything at any given time, but the mere act of measuring it affects the item being measured and therefore the measurement is invalid once it is made. Repeated measurements give you a statistical average which you can assume is the correct answer within a margin of error.
In the same way prices fluctuate up and down and the market is willing to pay a given amount at a given time. No one time is a correct price no one time is a correct demand, but eventually a settling around an average occurs and trends develop as demand increases/decreases and/or supply becomes more/less prevalent.
The signals in question are what the market will bear for a new idea (innovative thinking or new technology/ideas) or a given quantity of a good (a good being anything from raw ore to man-hours). Yes, you will have outliers (early adopters or idiots who will pay anything to have the latest doohickey), but eventually the market will set an average around which things will operate.
I don’t know if that answered the question and it’s just my thoughts on it, but ....
Willie:
Another relatively good Amtrak travel experience. Amtrak Cardinal Service maintains its perfect NOT-ON-TIME record; we arrived in Chicago early!
Sort of...
Wednesday’s train 51 from NYC was canceled after the Baltimore arrival was over an hour late. (On the plus side, Amtrak sent passengers with cell phones a voice mail message!) So when Wednesday’s 51 resumed service as Friday’s train 51, we actually arrived in Chicago one half-hour early.
Hooray for government run rail service!
>Except that even there drivers are cheated. The highway trust fund is frequently plundered by politicians to pay for “public transportation” projects (ie pork to pay off their donors)
Absolutely. Nothing is more preposterous than using proceeds from the gas tax to pay for a bloody bike path. Talk about cross purposes.
Then again any time you give a politician money, they will find a way to fritter it away no matter where it came from or what it was meant for.
“I know someone employed by the RR. On Christmas he gets a bonus equal to about a quarter of my annual income.”
Which Railroad? If it is a freight carrier like Union Pacific, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Norfolk Southern, etc, that is a private company — a business that gets no government money to conduct their business. These government “high speed trains” in article would be under Amtrak.
When present at the introduction of the Chevy Volt, he got in one and drove it.
Bad idea.
In just 10 feet he made it clear he didn’t know how to drive.
Gov. Perry did not force passenger rail on Austin. That was done by Cap Metro and the Austin Silly council. Yes, it is a joke. I heard the choo choo takes longer to get from Leander to downtown that it does in a car during rush hour.
No use pinging Willie. He got the ZOT from JR some time ago.
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