Cog wrote:Vote nationalism not the dead end of communism and socialism.
Baha is a useful idiot for communist propaganda who they will willingly execute when his usefulness to the party is over.
I wonder if, when considering ultimate efficiency of infrastructure, capitalism is the best answer? Is it that the market delivers the best answer, or that it delivers a certain answer when every other answer is up to opinion as to whether it will work? Planning does work sometimes, as can be seen in the development of China.
At its core, I think the struggle to understand efficiency is related to locality, the immediacy of a thing to an individual. People get involved initially, when the problems can be more easily answered. People prove that they can understand most things, once they can see that they are possible. They get a handle on them, and pay enough attention to gather them into their collective understanding of what they are to them as people, as defined within a community. Infrastructure has next level stuff, though.
To be the most efficient doesn't require simply attending to basic principles. It requires deciding upon a point of view. The markets will decide upon that point of view in the absence of the people paying enough energy and attention to the decision. The markets may not come up with the same decision that the people would have, had they paid enough attention. The market's decision can even be at cross purposes to that of the people. However, the market's decision is more likely to work than, say, an idealized decision of the people.
When people look at the length of time it may take to see whether a plan will work, and they have a market based choice available to them, they are more likely to choose the market based choice because the expense is not just money, but time that can't be gotten back. They don't tend to say that they could very well suffer for most of their lives while various false starts are made at maximizing the renewable aspect of their energy grid, or alleviating traffic on their roads so that 40 or 50 years from now their country or city can operate at maximum efficiency.
If it's not going to show up in their lifetimes, most people will go with the market. Anything else would require them to know too much about too many things without having shown them that a thing is possible. It would require an understanding of life beyond the level of understanding of the Twentieth Century, which they have gotten used to. I wonder what the impact of handheld devices will have on that as the Twenty First Century develops? We've already seen the impact of those upon an election or two. I wonder what kind of impact those will have upon decision making concerning the direction of cities? What's going to happen when those decisions which people would otherwise leave up to the market can be influenced by such things?
