Take a moment to consider all the resources used in the United States regarding automotive transportation since 1945. Think about all that metal that’s used on something that becomes obsolete and junked after only a decade or two. Think of all the labor involved in manufacturing them. And think of all the time individuals must spend on long commutes where they can’t do anything other than drive (because our time is a resource too). Think about how many more automobiles are needed than trains and buses. And then think about all the oil that’s needed to run those cars.

Now think about how little resources are needed for public transportation vehicles. How they last a lot longer, are more fuel efficient, and allow you to spend your time doing other things. It’s truly amazing how wasteful automobiles are. The automobile is the product of the free market and “individualism” run amok. A socialist country run by central planning wouldn’t dream of creating a society that’s based around the car because it’s so needlessly inefficient.

Let’s expand this a little further. The modern capitalist culture around cars is largely a post-WW2 invention. Look at a map of where you live. Try to figure out what your metro area looked like in 1945 and what it looks like now. I know for my hometown, the post-1945 part is several times larger than what was there before. And that all was built around automotive infrastructure. It boggles the mind the resources involved in that. All the concrete used for highways. All the land paved over for parking lots. All the inefficient single-family homes and strip malls. It’s hard to wrap your head around how much resources were used to build that.

Now think about the alternative: how few resources would be used in building housing for need with space efficiency in mind. How you need so much fewer roads and how you can connect cities with rail instead of highways. Think about how much less commercial areas you need under socialism. The later is just so much more efficient.

But in the debate of free markets versus central planning, all this seems to get skipped over in favor of “but socialism means no bananas in the winter” or “how will I be able to get the exact color iPhone case I want if it’s all centrally planned?” But the sheer waste of capitalism is overlooked because there was profit made the whole time. People never consider how those resources could have been better used.

I think if you took the US post-WW2 and made it socialist with central planning, we’d truly be living in a post-scarcity society by now. Even acknowledging how much of a “boost” the capitalist US economy gets from imperialism and environmental destruction, with socialism and just the resources within the US, we’d have so much that our society would have no choice but to massively reduce work hours. How wasteful capitalism is gets ignored because the waste is dealt with by a willing buyer and willing seller at a market clearing price (ignoring overproduction, I mean). The anti-communists don’t want to think about in terms of finite resources, and how those resources are used.

Idk, just something to think about.