Sure, blame consultants and not the fact that this was a really bad idea.

The Los Angeles times, attempting to make the case that “bad government” caused the high speed rail system in California to go off the rails: How California’s faltering high-speed rail project was ‘captured’ by costly consultants

When state rail authority employees go to their Sacramento headquarters, they work in offices rented by a consultant. When they turn on their computers, much of their data is stored on servers owned by consultants. The software they use to help manage the project is the property of a consultant.

I’m sorry, but I don’t buy this. I mean sure, “consultants” captured a fair amount of money–and the government has increasingly become reliant on “consultants” for everything from “renting a building” (though most of us know those folks as “real estate agents”, not “consultants”) to maintaining their computers. But as a consultant and someone who knows folks who work as government contractors, generally our high fees are tied in with the fact that we don’t get paid vacations or the government pays our payroll taxes or do we get health care or retirement. In fact, for every $50,000 paid to an employee, another $15,000 to $25,000 or so goes to all those benefits and office space and desk and equipment “consultants” must maintain themselves. And consultants can have a lot of down time; I’d estimate my own down time (time between contracts) at roughly 30% of my potentially billable hours. So if you pay me $100,000 for a 9 month project–guess what? I’m roughly in the same boat as that $50k/year employee.

No, where this project went off the rails was that it was sold as a done deal, as a project which could guarantee a high speed train between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2 hours and 40 minutes–a number we later learned was not based on reality, but on the authors of the bill figuring out a time which would make high speed rail competitive to the airlines. (The time to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco is about an hour–throw in the time to taxi and the time wasted in TSA–and you get to around 2 1/2 hours, give or take.)

And the reality on the ground was that when the voters approved this boondoggle in the making, no-one had yet figured out how you were supposed to get a 200mph train to pass through the mountains of the Tehachapis–which more resemble the mountains of Switzerland than the flat flood planes of France. (Note that Switzerland doesn’t have high speed rail, either.) Nor had they figured out how the train would run 200 miles per hour from somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley into San Francisco–and nevermind the sky-high price of land along the Silicon Valley corridor that leads from Goleta into San Francisco proper.

(And let’s set aside the fact that Amtrak closed their passenger rail service through the Tehachapis from Los Angeles to Bakersfield out of landslide and earthquake concerns decades ago–and uses a bus to take passengers into the San Joaquin Valley.)

So of course when they started building the system they started in the San Joaquin Valley. It was the only place where the geography is flat enough for high speed rail. But of course no-one lives in the San Joaquin Valley, which creates its own problems.

And that doesn’t even get into the fact that not a single high-speed rail project around the world–even those built in geographically favorable locations (such as France) return a profit. All of them are massive drains on their governments–governmental “vanity” projects. The one thing we Americans tend not to do–even Democrats, surprisingly–are massive “vanity” projects which require on-going financial support. Republicans hate the waste, and Democrats hate the fact that they are a persistent drain on the public purse that takes away from welfare and from teachers.

So the Los Angeles Times wants to blame “consultants.” Sure. How about that. Blame the “consultants” and don’t blame the fact that this was an ill-conceived blue-sky notion that no-one who supported the project (including the Los Angeles Times) thought through for a bloody millisecond before selling it as a done deal to the voting public. Probably because most Democrats working the Los Angeles Times never regularly drove through the Grapevine on I-5 to Bakersfield, because no upstanding proper urban Democrat in California even knows anyone who lives in the San Joaquin Valley or along those “crappy little towns along highway 99.”

Words mean things.

Socialism means the “means of production” are controlled by “the people”–either directly or through a representative proxy, and not by whomever owns the means of production. It implies communal ownership of “the means of production”–be it a factory or farmland or the tools you need to construct a house.

If what you’re looking for is what they do in the Nordic countries, that’s called “Free Market Capitalism” with “an expanded welfare state.” Sweden and Finland both toyed with Socialism years ago–to their countries economic misfortune. Which is why they’ve both privatized large sectors of their economy, and deregulated their economies to the point where it is easier for a private individual to create a company in Sweden than it is in the United States.

And Sweden and Finland both have their share of billionaires, including Stefan Persson, the main shareholder in H&M, whose fortune rivals that of Mark Zuckerberg or a handful of Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern oil tycoons.

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The difference between the two are the net beneficiaries of the “means of production.” If the “means of production” are seen primarily as needing to be guided and controlled by “the people” (or their “proxies”) in order to benefit “the people” in some fashion, and not “the wealthy” who own those “means of production”–then we’re talking about Socialism. And we need to be very careful here because on the whole, the track record for the centralized and planned control of the “means of production” has an incredibly dismal track record all around the world.

For example, see Venezuela.

Centralized planning of “the means of production”–regardless of what you call it–has a dismal track record because, fundamentally, central planning destroys price signaling, which can be used to determine what is desirable and what is not–and when individuals exploit the gaps between high prices (driven by desire) and low production prices (driven by ability or knowledge or opportunity), individuals create wealth by fulfilling desire.

And because central planning destroys price signals (by setting a target price rather than charging what the market will bear–which is often lowered by competitors in the market), central planning often has to rely on something different to determine production goals and price levels.

And that something is often “politics.” Politics does work when determine the moral outcome of some law–such as deciding when killing another human being is justified (such as in self-defense) or not. But it utterly and completely fails when determining what to product or how to price it.

Imagine President Trump in charge of pricing food in this country.

Now it may seem offensive to our sensibilities that the alternative: allowing individuals to control the “means of production”, individuals who are often incredibly and unimaginably wealthy. But consider that many of these folks in today’s modern world did not simply inherit the “means of production” in the way the French nobility inherited land (before they were sent to Madame Guillotine). Many of the billionaires in the United States made their fortunes by building the companies that made them rich–effectively creating new “means of production” out of whole cloth, such as Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft; Warren Buffet, the founder of Berkshire Hathaway; Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook; Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple; Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google; or Sam Walton, one of the founders of Walmart.

Rarely, if ever, does central planning invent new things. The best our own government does in that front is to throw money at inventors; this is how DARPA fundamentally works, as does other government agencies which provide block grants to private or University researchers who are doing work on the cutting edge. Without private incentives by private individuals to crate new things–including new ways to produce products and new ways to sell products–we would have no Apple, no Google, no Facebook, no Microsoft, no Walmart.

We would not have the wealth necessary to tax in order to support our current (fragmented) welfare system.

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And this was the lesson of the Nordic countries: if you wish to support a deep welfare state, you need wealth first. Poor people cannot help others; they have nothing they can give. It’s why the bulk of aid flows from the wealthy United States to the poor African countries rather than the other way around.

Remember to put on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you.

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Now I know a lot of folks and a lot of politicians on the Left who are now espousing “Socialism” as the cure-all for the “excesses” of the United States.

And my question to them is this:

By “socialism” do you mean to simply expand our welfare state, through higher taxes and a much better coordinated governmental response to those in need?

If that’s what you mean, then let me first challenge you to clean up our current welfare system–as there are thousands and thousands of massive gaps in our welfare system which create real problems for the poor. Gaps such as the one who caused a woman my wife was working with to suddenly be out on the street because of illness causing her to lose her job–leaving her without money and having to wait 60 days before she could access welfare benefits. (The answer here was to go to a private food pantry run by a food bank to get food–which would have been unnecessary if government-provided welfare benefits did not have a 60 day statutory pause on them.) Gaps such as one where Medicaid considers protein supplements, necessary for someone on kidney dialysis, as food–but food assistance considers medicine. Gaps such as the one where immunosuppressants for a kidney transplant are only provided for 3 years (while a transplanted kidney can last up to 10 years)–even though immunosuppressants are far cheaper than dialysis.

Walk through our welfare system and you can find literally thousands of gaps like this. Gaps which make navigating our welfare system a Sisyphean task: a full time job onto itself, and where your ability to afford housing in some areas literally rely on luck.

And once we’ve cleaned up these gaps, making welfare make far more sense to those who are in need–then we can talk about expanding welfare as we need it. Because right now, given how fucked up welfare is in our country, it’s hard to throw more money at the system because we honestly don’t know what is really needed out there.

If this is what you think when you think “Socialism,” I submit to you that you’re using the wrong word. The term you want is “welfare state,” and despite the negative connotations the term has gained in recent years, one of the most proper uses of wealth in a wealthy society is to provide welfare to those in need.

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But if by “socialism” you mean “seize the means of production from the rich and put it into the hands of the people,” I submit to you that this is not welfare. Nor is it a way to provide better welfare to the poor.

I submit to you that this is an entirely different animal, and everywhere where it has been tried in the name of “the people,” it has utterly and completely failed.

Look at Venezuela, for example. That nation did not collapse into utter poverty out of weakness of its institutions or because of the greed of a few. When socialism was first instituted in Venezuela, it was done in the name of the poor and in the name of providing affordable and nutritious food to the poor through price controls on food and on farm products.

And Venezuela did not fail because money was stolen or its economy sabotaged or because a few weak actors were unable to control themselves.

Venezuela’s economy unwound in a rather easy to predict fashion, in the same way that Cuba’s economy unwound, in the same way that Russia’s economy unwound under the Soviet Union.

Price controls destroyed price signaling. Farmers, unable to understand or predict what products to grow, were told what to grow by the government and how much to charge for their products. Those predictions often failed for two reasons: either the production targets were wrong (as the government cannot guess what people will want to consume), or because crop failures (which happen all the time throughout the world; today in the United States we’re suffering a crop failure in yellow corn thanks to flooding in the Midwest).

These failures and shortages cannot be signaled to the outside world through higher prices. (For the United States, yellow corn prices will go up, causing consumers to use alternative products, so you may not even know there is a severe yellow corn shortage unless you’re a farmer in the Midwest.)

So instead, you see shortages. Farmers who cannot benefit from higher prices from what crops they can save wind up being paid less–and below a certain amount and farmers wind up simply not being able to afford seed and fertilizer and farm equipment repairs for next year’s crops. If the government intervenes, it has to resort to borrowing money–which can last for a little while until they are forced (through further crop failure cycles) to default on those loans.

And once a country defaults on its loans in a centrally managed economy, extreme starvation is not far behind.

To say this can’t happen somewhere like the United States with our unimaginable wealth is to deny the inevitability of Socialism to destroy an economy through destroying price signaling. It’s to deny the law of gravity–to suggest we can all fly if we just wish hard enough.

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It’s why I believe anyone who proclaims themselves a Socialist is an idiot.

Because either they’re thinking of the wrong definition of that word. Or because they truly believe if we wish hard enough we can defy the law of gravity and all live amongst the clouds like angels.

A quick note.

I believe government engages in overreach.

I believe while there are things the government needs to do–many things people are proposing the government should do (such as single-payer health care or massive reworking of our energy sector or regulating what we eat) is fraught with massive failure. I also know that many things we blame on “free market failures” is really a failure of government overreach–especially as the government has a habit of not just setting goals, but also telling us how we are permitted to achieve those goals. And often the people telling us how to achieve those goals–from regulators using billing codes to dictate algorithms that doctors are forced to use to care for their patients, to military procurement bureaucrats dictating how government contractors are permitted to run their business and the profit margins they are permitted to take–are dumber than the people they’re managing. That stories like this (regarding taxing tampons while Viagra is not taxed) are not the exception; you can see similar stories about how poor patients in dialysis are denied protein supplements–as Medicaid considers it a nutritional supplement, while food assistance programs considers protein supplements medicine.

Further, I believe there is regulatory capture: companies who help write the legislation they’re expected to follow, who write it in such a way so as to reduce or eliminate competition. I also believe there is rent seeking, where large corporations, with the active cooperation of government bureaucrats, set up virtual monopolies–becoming gate keepers and through preventing competition for access, set themselves up to collect “rents” on things that would otherwise be free.

And despite the massive and intellectually dishonest attacks by the left on public choice theory, most notably Professor MacLean’s deplorable and ahistorical attacks in her intellectually dishonest book Democracy in Chains, which makes the assertion that the founders of public choice theory were a bunch of racists–which supposedly negates the ideas of “rent seeking” and “regulatory capture”–I do believe those on the Left, even the hard Left, understand these things do take place.

After all, it’s hard to deny the RIAA–who through copyright laws they helped to write that have massive and often strange carveouts regarding the use of music–have been using lawsuits to demand payment on behalf of artists they then fail to actually compensate. If this isn’t a perfect example of regulatory capture (by helping to write laws which benefit the RIAA) and rent seeking (serving as an exclusive gateway to access music from artists who are not then being compensated), I don’t know what is.

Just as I think it’s hard for even the most fervent far-leftist in this country to deny other failures in public choice policy (which asserts that government officials are also people who are subject to the same emotional failures as are corporate leaders)–such as the abuse of eminent domain or the abuses caused by civil asset forfeiture.

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All that said, however, if you believe that because I think the government engages in overreach, that government overreach causes problems in this country, that I believe the right answer to this is more bottom-up management of the economy and greater individual economic freedom with the government perhaps focusing on goals but not dictating process, that I also am an opponent of gay rights, that I believe bigotry is no big deal, that I think women should be relegated to being pregnant and bare-foot in the kitchen, that I think civil society in the 1950’s was somehow better and that minorities have all become “uppity”–then you are a fucking moron.

Just as if you believe that because I think the “Green New Deal” is highly problematic, that the advantages of our current reliance on solar and wind “renewables” are significantly overstated (and their CO₂ footprint is larger than advertised), and that the rush towards mass transit is more an exercise in removing the hoi-polloi from the sight of the wealthy than it is an attempt to “heal the planet”, that I somehow think pollution is a good thing and that the planet should be raped–then yes, you are indeed a fucking moron.

Further, if you think that my belief that true free market capitalism is the best way to keep large corporations honest by introducing more competition, that I believe we need deregulation–though “intelligent” deregulation (such as removing sections in the copyright law which create carveouts for the RIAA to exploit)–and that the best way for us to improve the lives of people is to encourage entrepreneurialship, and encourage individual freedom of choice when it comes to how they make and spend their money, that somehow this means that I believe unreservedly in the excesses of “big business”–why indeed, you really are a fucking moron.

It has always surprised me that one of the most radical economic theories out of the 1960’s–an era where we talked about “sticking it to The Man” and about “radical freedom” and during an era where we were advised to “turn on, tune in and drop out”–would be so resoundingly rejected by the Left. This radical economic theory posited that we don’t actually need governments for people to live their lives. That “the Man” was in the way, and if only “the Man” would stop being such a repressive hack, individual people would continue to live our lives, interacting with each other–making things for each other, selling good to each other, and otherwise make lives all without the watchful eye of “the Man” and the Pigs (the police) who enforces His dictates.

And yet, this radical idea that people could take care of ourselves was not just rejected by the Left–but adopted by Conservatives in this country–to me, that is an astounding bit of mental gymnastics. It would be as if Nixon was the protector of hippies and, from the White House, encouraging free love.

But that’s where we are.

And somehow, because I believe we should be allowed to live our lives as we choose–writing as we will, creating as we will, living as we will, and loving who we will–that this makes me a racist bigot who hates the poor.

Sometimes I’m gobsmacked by how stupid people can be.