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Townhall...
Passenger Trains:
Clearly the Change We’ve Been Waiting For
By John Stossel
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.
Read it at Townhall
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