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Comment by specproc | Hacker News Reader

> California approved high-speed rail in 2008 to link LA and San Francisco for $33 billion. Costs ballooned; there’s still no service. The U.K. canceled HS2’s northern leg after years of overruns. Berlin’s new airport opened almost a decade late and billions over budget. Meanwhile, China built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h.

Communism works.

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Well, authoritarianisim does. They were able to do that because they don't believe in property rights or worker protections. So it's a tradeoff.

Yes, but also they don't believe in the pseudo-democratic and ultra-bureaucratic mechanisms NIMBYs use to hamstring development.

I think I said that when I said they don't believe in property rights. :)

NIMBYs basically use property rights to their logical end. FWIW California is trying to fight this with laws that remove the rights of NIMBYs and their worst behaviors.

Ah, in the UK the NIMBYs don't just have property rights on their side, to stop things getting built.

There are also 'green belt' laws (which ban construction on land in a ring around many cities) and there are 'environmental impact' laws (which require you to check for things like rare species) and there are 'areas of outstanding natural beauty' and national parks (where it's a lot harder to build things) and local government 'planning permission' rules (which have pretty broad powers to block development and dictate what type of development is allowed) and rules for 'nationally significant infrastructure projects' (giving national government a big say on things like airports) and also 'judicial review' for decisions that don't go your way.

And almost all of these still apply, even if the government themselves are performing the construction.

In the UK, just because you own some land, doesn't mean you're allowed to build on it.

The fact that authoritarianism can build public projects faster has been well known for multiple millennia. But generally as people gain political power and expect more and more features you're rushed project won't scale to their demands and your project will be rewritten from scratch.

You are falling for hype metrics on a flashy MVP and filling in claims that were never made with fanciful imagination. Pushing code straight into production works great until it doesn't.

> Communism works.

This isn't communism; this is a 'let's get shit done and not argue' mentality. Counterpoint: India is generally considered democratic and capitalist, has a similarly-sized population and a similarly-sized landmass, but has zero kilometres of proper high-speed rail.

Competent governance works.

You are conflating the communist-capitalist axis with authoritarian-democratic axis.

China is not a communist country in practical terms and hasn't been for 30+ years.

that's what people say when china's doing well.

Built by massive debt. One of the key questions for China is if this investment is profitable in the long term.

It’s not even communism, more “get shit done”-ism. They practice it, while the US has devolved into “sclerotic and psychotic”-ism.

Well modern China works, they don't really have all that many communist principles at work. Of course they never tried that hard in the first place, it was just the PR paint job used for one set of authoritarians to rise over others.

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