[berto4]

We can argue all we want and present other points of view and narratives, but it seems the basic fact is just that the Chinese system is better...at least for these kind of big projects. Somehow America can't get it's act together for projects with some public good. we need to ease off the military shit for a while!

[akiselev]

Their system just hasn't been around long enough to accrue enough legal debt - pesky thing like "property rights", "environmental regulations", "labor laws", and "due process" that people start demanding as they go up Maslow's hierarchy.

[bllguo]

The enshrinement of property rights in America has led to such wonderful things as ridiculous housing prices, rampant income inequality, endemic homelessness, the absurdity of Prop 13, etc. and yet we still trumpet it. When do we start reexamining these foundations?

We can always find something to justify putting on airs of superiority, but the fact remains that our infrastructure stagnates while the rest of the world manages to modernize. Forget the China comparisons if they are so triggering. Europe still manages public works. Individual rights have to give at some point for the good of society.

[dragonwriter]

> When do we start reexamining these foundations?

Start? The entire labor movement, the public accommodation portion of the civil rights movement, and the rest of the transition from gilded age capitalism to the modern mixed economy has been a process of reexamination of and evolutionary progress from the classic capitalist conception of properry rights. Just as, for that matter, the several centuries of evolution from feudalism and other pre-capitalist economic systems through Enlightenment liberalism to the peak of gilded age capitalism was such a reexamination of pre-capitalist ideas of property rights. And while you can conceptualize them roughly as successive and mobotonic, both of those are oversimplifications; elements of pre-capitalist patronage-oriented systems were still around past the peak of capitalism, and isolated points of reversions from capitalism to them or to purer capitalist models from their replacements occurred throughout the process and still do.

But the idea that society is sitting on some static foundation of property rights that is waiting for a beginning of a reexamination is...not remotely tenable.

[bllguo]

Well touche, I'm fine with saying I'm wrong and that we've started. But it sure seems like a glacial pace. Whether we have already been reexamining property rights or not is IMO the least important part of my stance

[dragonwriter]

Fundamental reorganization of society tends to take place in one of two ways:

(1) painfully slowly, or

(2) catastrophically, with massive bloodshed.

And while #2 often produces more rapid change considered over a short term, it also tends to be less secure change subject to equally rapid and equally bloody reversal.

It's frustrating, but I’m not convinced its solvable.

[shadilay]

Chines public rail projects tend to come with an interpretation of property law (that you have none) that would not fly in the west.

[pedroma]

CPC: Here's some money to move out, take it or leave it. You're still moving out though.