I am reminded how we got existing rail line through much of the U.S. 19th century land acquisition for private parties who built that infrastructure is easy to spin as a travesty. In many cases it was blatant corruption. And the legacy lasts to this day. All of that land and infrastructure is still privately owned.
Fast forward to today. Is it right that the government should build infrastructure to compete with existing private businesses? Should they build and operate grocery stores? Automakers? ISPs? Textile factories?
There used to be some idea that the government should not compete with private industry. That idea is much murkier more recently.
But if you want to build public infrastructure to compete with the likes of Union Pacific, shouldn't you start by nationalizing the likes of Union Pacific?
See also USPS for more interesting examples of public vs private enterprise. Imagine that the USPS contracted local delivery and long-haul transfer. Imagine that a local mom and pop could bid on a local contract. Newspaper delivery bicycle contractors everywhere could double their money for little additional effort. Or FedEx/UPS/Amazon might really sharpen their pencils and win those contracts.
The USPS is legally obligated to deliver mail to every household, 6 days a week. The private carriers don’t come anywhere close to meeting that level of service. Most of the US is incredibly sparsely populated. There won’t be bicycle contractors lining up to deliver mail up the Adirondacks or across the Great Plains.
How would a network of private interests handing off parcels between each other under government regulation deliver better service than a single organization with the problem already solved thanks to 200 years of domain expertise?
I'm not in favor of this approach, either we have a really free market (with some limited regulation for things like anti-fraud) or you have the government manage the service. These public-private partnerships just seem to be grift programs write large. Let's not push for more corporatism. If there is already a private market, then sure, have the government bid for private contracts within that market. Otherwise you have companies whose full-time roles is figure out how to squeeze more money out of government, and they lobby hard to do so, often with much success (at filching taxpayers)
Where I live, USPS doesn't deliver to any household, but UPS and FedEx do.
But that is beside the point. Any party that contracted with the USPS would be obligated to meet the terms of the contract.
You might be surprised at who lines up to deliver mail up the Adirondacks. One of the virtues of a free market is the amazing ingenuity of entrepreneurs to meet market demand in the most efficient ways. The free market provides the motivation for such ingenuity whereas non-profit single-player monopolies often don't.
But still this misses my interest in this discussion. I think there is an optimum balance for publicly-owned infrastructure and privately-owned service providers. But that balance is not always obvious and usually not stable. I think there is great benefit in continuous discussion of the pros and cons to monitor and adjust how we leverage the strengths of both sides of the equation.
I like the idea of "build more rail lines." But it takes more that four words to make this happen. If you are just trying to replace the pork of military spending, then perhaps the details don't matter. Just trade one corruption for another. Let the power brokers beat each other up clamoring for the money.
But if you're making such radical changes to the redistribution of wealth, why not have some thoughtful discussion that people can reference for the next 100s of years. Who are the Lockes and Keynes of 2021? I know they exist. Let's bring them out in public discussion.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with building public infrastructure considering in many cases the infrastructure in question would form a natural monopoly. However, car manufacturers, grocers, textile factories have lots of competition. Those markets are very healthy.
American ISPs fail to provide good service even in wealthy locations. Google had to stop their gigabit fiber rollout. That's definitively a failing market where a baseline of service should be provided by governments. Private companies can always provide superior service and charge for it.
SpaceX is everyone's favourite private sector success story, but they're basically just a younger, leaner version of Lockheed— surviving off of NASA and doing what they're contracted to do.
I don't think the private sector is ever going to do ambitious things like build rail infrastructure all on its own, nor is the current PPP model necessarily the way either, but maybe there is some option out there to get things done which looks like the bakeoff that NASA held with CRS.
In 2020, SpaceX did 26 launches. Only six of those had NASA as a customer. The rest were a mix of US military, commercial customers, foreign governments (Argentina and South Korea), and Starlink. Even if you add up NASA and US military, that's still only nine out of 26 with the US government as the customer.
So while no doubt SpaceX does benefit from NASA's business, it is now only a minority.
There is no VC who would have accepted a pre-SpaceX pitch for low cost launches, Starlink, or any of the rest of it. It would have been straight up "lol Iridium amirite, get out."
SpaceX was funded by Elon Musk and later, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund. Starlink has been in part funded by a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity. And since then further funding rounds have been raised.
The DFJ and Founder's Fund investment was before SpaceX had any substantial NASA development contracts, let along their 2008 $1.6 billion launch contract.
Until the Dragon demo flights in 2012-2013, I think SpaceX would have been hard pressed to raise significant capital from anyone other than Elon's friends. I think the fact that so many private space companies have one or more wealthy benefactors bears this out (Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Armadillo to a lesser extent).
Another Musk inspired project is the hyperloop and of course the Boring tunnels for electric cars. These are novel transportation solutions that solve for the problem in a more creative way than simply "build more light rails". That's the type of stuff a government will never come up with. There needs to be a creative maestro with massive capital. Musks are rare in the world but they certainly can move in a more agile way when they do appear.
I would also argue, telecommuting has solved for some of the transportation problems alone. Think of how many less cars are on the road as a result of work from home.
Boring/Hyperloop don't have an idea like this. Boring's pitch is using conventional TBMs but making it cheaper by digging a smaller-diameter tunnel than the other guy. Does that meet the requirements? New subway systems are also reducing tunnel diameter by using LRVs instead of heavy rail cars... is there an actual innovation here?
Hyperloop is full of practicality issues, and addresses none of the real problems that are barriers to high speed mass transit projects today— specifically the fights over rights of way and station locations. The fact that it was initially pitched in 2013 as a system for moving around private automobiles should tell you a lot about how much understanding there is of the first principles of transportation— it wasn't until years later that this was acknowledged and corrected [1]. It would be like someone proposing an airline where each plane carries 10 cars instead of 400 passengers ("so convenient, you just drive right on board!")— it doesn't matter how fast the trains are, 840 passengers per hour for a Hyperloop would be a complete nonstarter when a normal subway does 40k/hr.
Maybe Boring/Hyperloop will end up pivoting into something worthwhile, but at the moment there is good reason for skepticism.
[1]: https://www.masstransitmag.com/technology/news/12402366/elon...
The cost of reusing a rocket has not been proven to be cheaper than building a new rocket. Consider factors like the inability to reuse the entire rocket, the reduced payload. At best you can break even. Unless you somehow reuse the entire rocket and do 100 flights with the same rocket the savings are meager.
This isn't something new. The space shuttle suffered from the same issues. Building new shuttles was almost the same cost and less risky.
But now that the basic principle has been proven, really leaning into it is part of the point of Starship— a new clean sheet design that is built for full reusability from the get go.
He just took the 100 year old vac train concept and repackaged it. Back in his original pitch he constantly said and laughed how easy it is. Once the years went by he slowly backed off from every promise and ultimately reduced his involvement to 0.
> of course the Boring tunnels for electric cars.
He promised to make tunnel boring cheaper, yet his only tunnel costs exactly as much as every other tunnel. He constantly advertises 150mph travel when the tunnel isn't even long enough to reach that speed. Have you seen the tunnel? It's so tiny you can't even open your doors if you get stuck in there. If even a single car fire starts in that tunnel everyone in the tunnel will die.
Really this is more similar to VC investment where NASA funded it so they could get a return (better launches), but the future is that a probably large percentage of launches will be for commercial purposes (~50% of 2022 launches are for Starlink).
The cynic in me thinks it has to do with power projection and the economy.
The less cynical part of me wonders if it’s related to a cognitive bias that over-weights threats from rival “tribes” and the need to ensure stability
Especially for the states (and representatives) that the ice storm is 100 year. Dams fail, and when they fail, they don't affect the people that didn't want to live near a dam.
It seems like we’re just really bad at thinking clearly about low probability / high severity risks
The dam flooding isn't random, its an unfrequent event that will occur so it is something we should prepare for.
CEOs are graded quarter-to-quarter and politicians every 2-4 years. Low probability events (plane crashes, infrastructure failures, etc.) may not ever happen during their tenure, incentivizing them to defund preparing for them to favor other programs, understanding full well they’re bound to occur
You actually make a great point, even if the money has to go to defense and not other purposes, it should still be useful for the purpose of defense.
The reason why the USA uses the military as a jobs program is that it's the only thing that gets bipartisan support.
But what real communism did isn't even relevant here, I'm pretty sure GP is talking about imaginary communism in the sense that anything that is good for the general population is somehow called communism in US politics.
From 0:
The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products.
Whaling, like every other industry in the Soviet Union, was governed by the dictates of the State Planning Committee of the Council of Ministers, a government organ tasked with meting out production targets. In the grand calculus of the country’s planned economy, whaling was considered a satellite of the fishing industry. This meant that the progress of the whaling fleets was measured by the same metric as the fishing fleets: gross product, principally the sheer mass of whales killed.
0. https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
Pure communists think that the government baseline should be enough for everyone, even if it means inferior service.
Pure capitalists think that superior service should be enough for everyone, even if it is unaffordable.
The obvious answer is to find the middle ground and reap the benefits of both.
I personally don't think that the F-35 is falling into that. A jobs program fighter jet doesn't really make sense since it is not a long term investment with a direct return. It's more of an insurance policy against an imaginary foe. Yes, you have jets but unless you use them to conquer land or defend yourself there is no direct return on investment.
As Inread that I think: basic services are too important to miss the feedback loop and become the equivalent of universal low grade government cheese. At the same time, maybe the poor quality of government provided baseline goods and services would incentivize people to attain better, which is an improvement over direct subsidies which act like high marginal taxes when they are reduced in response to income growth. Unfortunately a significant number of basic needs are commodities, such as cheese, and are subject to mismeasure and goal seeking instead of value seeking, similar to the Soviet whaling industry of the 1960s/70s.
The F-35: similar to SLS and Soviet whalers, political considerations are weighted higher than value ones. The F-35 also has the challenge of being developed at a transitional period, in the late morning of a period that will be marked by low observability, human optionality, and high speed and precision impact. The F-35s story isn’t over yet and like other troubled weapons systems there is a lower than likely chance it may blossom like the M-16. It has already passed the Sgt York stage and is in the a state where like the BFV it will find its place within doctrine and eventually battle, or not. I think it is too soon to tell.
Look at it another way. Which countries have walls to keep people out? And which have walls to keep people in?
Barbed wire on the borders, bullets shot without warning at swimmers trying to cross freezing rivers, then families held hostage and tortured to punish and warn escapees - oh Communism was such an awesome experience, I can only wish it from the bottom of my heart to all its apologists.
In a sense it is both good and bad that the Wall has been erased, people forget what it was like. Nobody should forget.
Communists killed local population by millions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_state...
Crimes against humanity ain’t a minor issue you can ignore. Directly related to communism. Democratic states don’t do that, communist regimes did that a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity_under_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...
> had higher standards of living while they didn’t
That’s debatable. Might be true in 1910-1920, but by the end of the last century all communist states with planned economy have failed their economies, catastrophically so, with direct consequences on standards of living. China’s the only exception, were lucky to have smart enough people in power to pivot towards market economy, and execute it relatively well.
Not to mention funding schools, universities, or government research grants.
That's among the things that get called communism or socialism here in the US.
Of course. That doesn't mean the services it provides aren't socialism. For a country on balance to be socialist, more than have of its goods and services would need to be provided by the government.
> that definition doesn't sound useful.
It's exactly what socialism is:
"a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
The first definition when googling "definition of socialism". Government is the means by which the community effects socialism.