next steps and short course, high speed steam

To:	steam_tech@yahoogroups.com
From:	"wholelephant" Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Date:	Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:24:48 -0000
Subject:	[steam_tech] next steps & short course

NEXT STEPS
What these 48,000+ postings need is a list of Frequently Used Search
Terms (FUST). It would save a lot of shooting in the dark. Some of
them could use a tag, such as hfbrown, since a search for h f brown
will turn up any number of listings for derek, marcellus, etc., fine
fellows, undoubtedly, or they would not be posted here, but not hf.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics, said Mark Twain.
Unfortunately many decisions in this industrial age have to be made by
the numbers. Brown's numbers are not Gospel, to be sure. I personally
would like to see a breakdown by kinds of road service, drag freight,
fast freight, and passenger, if that is at all possible. Somewhat
beyond the scope of his paper are the artificially low interest rates
of the period, a powerful subsidy for the more capital-intensive
diesel and for such time-consuming, far removed in time from consumer
sale investments as extraction, raw materials and heavy machinery, per
Mises business cycle theory. Likewise, depletion allowances, at the
time 27% for oil and 10% or so for coal. Still, his numbers are the
best we have and still fertile, little tapped, grist for the
pencil-pushers DPM left the matter to in 1961. Beyond the numbers,
nevertheless, is the pointed, animated discussion.
As for economic interests, Brown was an advocate of electrification,
even more capital intensive, of course, than dieselization.
Pinkepank's July 1970 TRAINS article on electrification, again, can be
updated in twenty-five words or less. The economic and ethical
pitfalls of electrification, as long as we are into that sort of
thing, more or less generally the Tom Swift/Lyndon LaRouche approach
to high technology, are concretely demonstrated in Vol. 131 of the
Interstate Commerce Commission reports, the 1928 Milwaukee Road
bankruptcy. The electrification was celebrated for the train coming
down the hill powering the train going up, but the copper, electrical,
and banking interests on the CMStP&P board had the railroad buy twice
as much electricity as it really needed, not that the west coast
extension was such a good idea to begin with. Also see Vol 31 on the
New Haven and how business was sometimes done then, the mileau in
which Brown got started. The ICC reports should be readily available
in most large law libraries. Also see William Z. Ripley's books of
that period. All of this makes talk of GM conspiracies seem rather tame.
In light of recent postings and the spate of recent books on oil and
(less debatably) capital running out, who knows exactly when, it would
seem there are three markets for new steam emerging:
1. A stop-gap locomotive, a not quite off-the-shelf grand old trouper
that could be tooled up quickly. My nomination would be the van
Sweringen Berkshire, which compiled a superb record on several
railroads, likewise accumulated widespread experience on fan trips,
and which, even a half century and three generations into
dieselization, could probably handle over half of today's road
assignments, freight and passenger. Much the same tooling could also
produce the KCS 2-10-4 and the C&O T-1/PRR J1. If project three,
below, stalls, we might also consider the N&W A and, as diesels
deplete, the Y6b.
2. A branch line, light duty local freight locomotive, an updated
Consolodation or light Mikado, a simple, basic machine of low capital
cost and maintenance.
3. A fast, heavy freighter, more or less an updated N&W Class A. The
principal decision is between turbine or divided compound drive, which
undoubtedly will require some in-the-metal experimentation and thus a
substantial research budget. 12,000 hp should be quite a reasonable goal.

A SHORT COURSE ON CENTRALIZED "ECONOMICS"
Let's clean up an ethnic joke. Two members of an ethnic group had ben
friends all their lives and one was dying. He asked his friend to pour
a fifth of their ethnic beverage on his grave on the anniversary of
his death and got bck, "Do you mind if I do it through my kidney?"
A city kid on a farm saw a cow and was told that is where his milk
comes from. It does not, says the kid; it comes from a bottle.
How do we get it from the bottle without mistaking it for the cow?
Why is it that even the most prodigious better mousetrap builders,
George
Westinghouse, say, cannot beat a good enough path to financial resources?
In a centralized economy it is hard. Economic survival is too often a
matter of getting it through the kidney, not of building a better
mousetrap. Unlearning is more difficult than learning. But let's try.
Centralized finance is a system of subsidy and protection that favors
some enterprises and disfavors others, there being no free lunch. The
Wealth of Nations is little but an expose` of protection. The 1820s
controversy over the Second Bank of the United States was inflamed by
its president's statement that he had not used its power to hurt other
banks, prompting the retort that they existed by his forbearance. The
anti-Bank Jacksonians spoke with forked tongue, however, since their
banks expanded like crazy when the federal Bank was no longer around
to moderate their issues and shortly plunged the country into a boom
and bust. In the 1820s also Henry Clay proposed his "American System"
of high tariffs, internal improvements (public works), and paper
money, finally implemented by Abraham Lincoln, establishing corporate
welfare, according to Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln. Newly
installed railroad lawyers on the Supreme Court overturned a ruling
barely a year old against Civil War greenbacks, amidst fears of
curtailing development, according to Gustavus Myers, History of the
Supreme Court. The "Progressive Era" reforms were not brought about by
outraged populists, but by financial interests seeking to curb
competition, according to Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation and
The Triumph of Conservatism.
Read the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto and ask yourself what
would be the more drastic change in early third millenium industrial
society, to fulfill them or to abolish them. Also read a couple
paragraphs ahead, that they are intended to establish a despotic
control over capital.
Also see Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families, on the 1915
speach Morgan partner Thomas Lamont gave on the financial consequences
of WWI. Depending on the duration of the war, he said several times in
less than a page, American capital would be able to take over projects
heretofore financed by England, France, and Germany, and the dollar
would become the reserve currency of the world.
"War Is Peace," 1984, is merely this system of capital destruction
carried to a logical, indeed, Keynsian, conclusion. Keynes actually
said wars, earthquakes, and pyramid-building serve to increase wealth.
Also see Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, on Hitler being the first
Keynesian. Excessive as military expenditures are, they are far from
the only way of dissipating capital, however, transportation
boondoggles being a prime auxiliary.
With the insight of hindsight over the past century an a half, it can
be fairly said the ten planks do as intended. Within a year or two of
the Manifesto, Frederic Bastiat, Economic Harmonies, said of economic
centralization:
"It is quite common, however, to attribute to capital a kind of
deadly efficiency that would plant selfishness, hardness, and
Machiavellian duplicity in the hearts of those who possess it. But is
this not confused thinking? There are countries where labor is mainly
fruitless. The little that is earned must go quickly for taxes. In
order to take from you the fruit of your labor, what is called the
state loads you with fetters of all kinds. It interferes in all your
activities; it meddles in all your dealings; it tyrannizes over your
understanding and your faith; it deflects people from their natural
pursuits and places them all in precarious and unnatural positions; it
paralyzes the activities and the energies of the individual by taking
upon itself the direction of all things; it places responsibility for
what is done upon those who are not responsible, so that little by
little the distinction between what is just and what is unjust becomes
blurred; it embroils the nation, through its diplomacy, in all the
petty quarrels of the world, and then it brings in the army and the
navy; as much as it can, it perverts the intelligence of the masses on
economic questions, for it needs to make them believe that its
extravagances, its unjust aggressions, its conquests, its colonies,
represent a source of wealth for them. In these countries it is
difficult for capital to be accumulated in natural ways. Their aim,
above all, is by force and guile to wrest capital from those who have
created it. The way to wealth there is through war, bureaucracy,
gambling, government contracts, speculation, fraudulent transactions,
risky enterprises, public sales, etc. The qualities needed to snatch
capital violently from the hands of the men who create it are exactly
the opposite of the qualities that are necessary for its formation. It
is not surprising, therefore, that in those countries CAPITAL connotes
ruthless SELFISHNESS; and this connotation becomes ineradicable if the
moral judgements of the nation are derived from the history of
antiquity and the Middle Ages."
Another century and a half earlier John Locke said:
"... great robbers punish little ones to keep them in their
obedience, but the great ones are rewarded with laurels and triumphs,
because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world
and have the power in their hands which should punish offenders... "
Second Treatise of Government, 176
Orwell and Bastiat both died of tuberculosis in their late forties in
the late forties of their respective centuries, and both offered their
parodies of Keynesian "spend ourselves rich" "economics."
The government is indeed the executive committee of the ruling class.
What to do about it? In short, scab on the capital union. As Adam
Smith put it,
"As the quantity of stock to be lent at interest increases, the
interest, the price which must be paid for the use of that stock,
necessarily diminishes, not only from those general causes which make
the market price of things commonly diminish as their quantity
increases, but from other causes which are peculiar to this particular
case. As capitals increase in any country, the profits which can be
made by employing them necessarily diminish. It becomes gradually more
and more difficult to find within the country a profitable method of
employing any new capital. There arises in consequence a competition
between different capitals, the owner of one endeavoring to get
possession of that employment which is occupied by another. But on
most occasions he can hope to justle that other out of this employment
by no other means but by dealing on more reasonable terms. he must not
only sell what he deals in somewhat cheaper, but in order to get it to
sell, he must sometimes too buy it dearer. The demand for productive
labor, by the great increase in funds which are destined for
maintaining it, grows every day greater and greater. Labourers easily
find employment, but the owners of capitals find it difficult to get
labourers to employ. Their competition raises the wages of labor, and
sinks the profits of stock. But when the profits which can be made by
the use of a capital are in this manner diminished, as it were, the
price which can be paid for the use of it, that is, the rate of
interest, must necessarily be diminished with them."
What more succinct a description of economic progress is there, even
if it does not recognize new production? It also explains why
entrenched capitalists do not want capital getting into competing
hands. As Grameen Bank founder Mohammad Yunus updates it,
"If we imagine a world where every human being is a potential
entrepreneur, we'll build a system to give everybody a chance to
materialize his or her potential. The heavy wall between the
`entrepreneur' and `labor' will be meaningless. If labor had access to
capital, this world would be very different from what we have now. We
build what we imagine. In the past we have imagined the wrong way
[and] as a result we got a wrong world. By formulating our axioms the
right way, we can create the right world.
"In the `right' world, we'll have to forget that people should wait
around to be hired by somebody. We must install in everybody's mind
that each person creates his or her own job. We'll build institutions
in such a way that each person is empowered to create his or her own
job: self-employment. Wage employment will come into the picture only
as an alternative to self-employment. The more self-employment becomes
attractive, wide-ranging, and self-fulfilling, the more difficult it
will be to attract people for wage jobs. Women, minority groups, the
physically handicapped, and the socially handicapped will benefit from
self-employment becoming more rewarding and convenient."
Since time immemorial leftists have wanted to take from the rich and
give to the poor, quite without figuring what would happen if the rich
could not take from the poor, or the build-a-better- mousetrap
builders, in the first place.
But figure the market is a computer. If you do not like the garbage
coming out, then keep it from going in. Maybe then it will be possible
to build a better mousetrap without getting embroiled in all sorts of
gamesmanship.
Build-a-better- mousetrap builders of the world, unite! You have
nothing to lose but the parasites taking from you and demanding
tribute to get it back!