Think government knows what is best for us?
This from Charles Lane of the Washington Post (hat tip Cato’s Dan Mitchell) [bold emphasis mine]
For the past eight years, Liu Zhijun was one of the most influential people in China. As minister of railways, Liu ran China’s $300 billion high-speed rail project. U.S., European and Japanese contractors jostled for a piece of the business while foreign journalists gushed over China’s latest high-tech marvel.
Today, Liu Zhijun is ruined, and his high-speed rail project is in trouble. On Feb. 25, he was fired for “severe violations of discipline” — code for embezzling tens of millions of dollars. Seems his ministry has run up $271 billion in debt — roughly five times the level that bankrupted General Motors. But ticket sales can’t cover debt service that will total $27.7 billion in 2011 alone. Safety concerns also are cropping up.
Faced with a financial and public relations disaster, China put the brakes on Liu’s program. On April 13, the government cut bullet-train speeds 30 mph to improve safety, energy efficiency and affordability. The Railway Ministry’s tangled finances are being audited. Construction plans, too, are being reviewed.
Liu’s legacy, in short, is a system that could drain China’s economic resources for years. So much for the grand project that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likened to a “moon shot” and that President Obama held up as a model for the United States.
Rather than demonstrating the advantages of centrally planned long-term investment, as its foreign admirers sometimes suggested, China’s bullet-train experience shows what can go wrong when an unelected elite, influenced by corrupt opportunists, gives orders that all must follow — without the robust public discussion we would have in the states.
This exemplifies what has been wrong in China. Similar to our previous accounts of ghost cities and Potemkin malls, what has largely been touted as the “Chinese growth miracle” seems more like a boom bust cycle from reckless centrally planned ‘delusions of grandeur’ financed by Chinese taxpayers.
And cracks appear to be widening as time goes by. Once malinvestments reach a “tipping point” or a critical mass then these cracks will break into a torrent.
Next, this further shows how wastage and inefficiency of government spending translates into huge negative externality costs. Centralization "orders that all must follow" translates to systemic fragility where losses are borne by everybody "could drain China's economic resources for years", while losses from decentralization are distributed hence anti (less) fragile (Nassim Taleb-Fooled By Randomness).
In addition, the above likewise exhibits how taxpayer resources are wasted on facilities or infrastructure projects that are hardly demanded for by consumers. Because non-profit oriented central planning decision making neglects the risk-reward tradeoffs and are instead guided by political goals, taxpayers end up absorbing the consequences of wrong decisions (sales can't cover debt service and safety issues).
Moreover, this is another example where government finds it too easy to spend someone else’s money. To quote the illustrious economist Milton Friedman “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.” Apparently this is a universal trait for politicians and bureaucrats.
And importantly, discretionary power over spending other people’s money becomes too much a temptation to resist claims over other people’s money as one’s own. Thus, concentration of power, enabled by arbitrary laws, serves as breeding and nestling grounds for corruption, in the above case "embezzlement".
Finally central planners believe that they know better of what society needs than of the individual through the markets. As the above also shows, they don’t.
This further validates the knowledge problem proposed by the great F. A. Hayek as evidenced by majestic mistakes which continually plagues the “unelected elite”:
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design
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