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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Or we’ve invested far too much money in building a road network and the economic value from it either isn’t captured to sustain it OR it’s insufficient to cover costs and it’s being subsidized. Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine. Pretending like capitalism is the thing that creates economic tradeoffs is incorrect and it’s just scapegoating capitalism - of course every economic system will have problems, but potholes are not uniquely a capitalism problem but more a problem of maintenance after huge capital investments for building infrastructure - maintenance is always harder and a debt that previous generations saddled us by building said infrastructure and that’s true whatever economic model you follow. China will have a similar problem in ~100-200 years as the cost to maintain all the roads, power plants, and buildings start to become a reality.

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It's funny how the "hard choices" fingerwagging never comes out to scold the parts of the economy where rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are, and it's such a dogmatic article of faith that the gross excess over there couldn't possibly have anything to do with the deprivation over here.

Equally dogmatic take. A lot of scarcity is artificial.

Yep. Move all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and whoops! The well ran dry! Better cut social programs, nothing else to be done, no sir!

I'm not sure what your point is, are you complaining about... compound interest?

No, I'm complaining about r>g.

> Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine.

Have you ever driven on a cobblestone street? There are a few in the city where I grew up and it's pretty obvious why we don't build that way anymore. It's like driving on an uneven dirt road, you're lucky to get above 25MPH consistently lest you want to risk damaging your car.

I think a healthy proportion of HN would view a "<=25mph or your car breaks" as a feature, not a bug.

My point is that classifying it as a “need” is strange because it’s in no way the same as eating or drinking or love. It’s useful for modern society but “need” feels wrong.

> Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine.

Nobody was going 55-75mph+ with multi-thousand pound vehicles on cobblestone streets.

Potholes lead to vehicle damage, property damage and death.

Commerce drives the economy, and commerce needs roads. Even ancient Rome understood this. Once Rome could no longer protect the roads and travel ranges became shorter the economy declined much more quickly.

If society can't afford roads and therefor can no longer afford to conduct commerce, society can't afford to exist.

Last I knew China's new train system wasn't generating the income needed to pay down the construction debt. It's going to be interesting to watch how things play out long term.

I mean, I don't disagree with you. But potholes are a stand in for infrastructure repair. I bike everywhere, my bike lanes and paths have holes. Water systems still dump lead, electricity and broadband networks aren't resilient. Potholes are just visible failures we can just to analogize.

Don't get too locked in on the specific.

Profit isn't exactly the problem here. We could pay people to fix various kinds of infrastructure, they could make big profits, that would be great - if only they existed and had figured out their business plans.

If they have profit, we should be splitting that money towards addressing other needs. Maybe some profit is fine for ensuring sustainability or whatever, but like, potholes aren't the only need.

If money was duct tape, that would follow. I think of it as like gratitude (when paid) and influence (when gained). So we'd be grateful to the road-menders, or broadband-stabilizers, and they could accrue a big pile of influence. What will they do with it? Perhaps they want something stupid and pointless, like building a pyramid.

If we're not going to allow that, there's no need for money at all. We'd vote on what needs doing, and it would always be something like mending roads, and we'd all have to knuckle down and do it, through a conscription-like system, on pain of pain. It would never be fixing the broadband, though, because broadband is a crazy imaginative project, like building a pyramid, so there wouldn't be any.

The mistake was made but the entrenched interests of unrestrained capitalism ensure that a new direction will never be pursued.

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