You make the production of basic necessities sound simple, while ignoring the great amount of evidence to the contrary, i.e. Kruschev's famous tour of the grocery store.
You make the production of basic necessities sound simple, while ignoring the great amount of evidence to the contrary, i.e. Kruschev's famous tour of the grocery store.
40,000.
But yes, if you keep throwing money at a problem, it tends to go away. Or at least disappear.
For as long as there have been armies, good logistics continues to be a critical need. There's a reason large army deployments are always accompanied by large black markets.
But hey, as the Lockheed Martin VP says, "the best weapon is the one that's never used".
The market has myopia and rarely makes huge long-term investments, and sometimes it leads people off a cliff like a band of lemmings.
For example, it's given the United States a plethora of entertainment but decaying infrastructure, and the housing and dot-com bubbles.
The best system seems to be a mix of both central planning and private markets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_United_States_ho...
And central planning was essential to the clean up afterwards.
I think that supports the idea that a mix of the two is best.
It was driven by central planners by incentivising mortgage companies to lend recklessly, as these companies knew the mortgages were guaranteed by quasi-governmental companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which currently hold ~87% of all mortgages [1]. No wonder the Fed is so keen on pumping up housing prices (through too-low interest rates)
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/06/business/helpi...
But first, when the bubble was happening, conservatives said that prices were sound, would never crash, and this was because they were the product of market forces. But then the bubble burst, and overnight conservatives switched to saying it had all been unsound because of government intervention.
So let me ask you, what was your position when the bubble was happening, and how did you respond when conservatives suddenly changed their story?
I think you've misinterpreted the statistic you quoted.
During the bubble, lenders found easy money for mortgages from private markets, and it was after the bubble ended that the government stepped in to prop up prices.