Comment by DiogenesKynikos

> Air travel and road travel isn't. Cargo shipping isn't.

I don't know about cargo shipping, but both air and road travel are subsidized (and I strongly suspect the same is the case for cargo shipping).

> It also just fails a quick reality check: if it were true then passenger railways would be profitable in their own right, as businesses would be happy to buy tickets for employees at their true costs.

What you're effectively arguing is that the only way to measure whether basic infrastructure has positive externalities is to ask whether it turns a profit. By that argument, all government spending on infrastructure is wasteful - a position that I think is obviously wrong.

> HSR is famously mostly empty in China. Go read accounts of anyone who has travelled on the newer lines.

I've traveled on Chinese HSR many times. It is extremely heavily used. Trains are usually packed. I've had to buy first-class tickets before, simply because the regular carriages were completely sold out (luckily, first class is not too expensive on Chinese HSR, and the upgrade is definitely worth it).

What are you basing your impression of HSR being empty on? Are you basing that on newspaper articles in Western press, on first-hand experience, on data, or on something else?

> Nobody stacks shelves with products that will never be sold.

You began by comparing China to the USSR, and talking about Yeltsin was shaken by the abundance of consumer products in the US. This comparison just completely fails when it comes to China. The China of today has a crazy abundance of consumer goods for sale. The malls are full of every type of shop with full shelves. There are packed markets with stalls selling everything. You can buy pretty much any consumer product you can imagine on your smartphone. There are endless numbers of couriers driving on electric scooters throughout every Chinese city, delivering people's online orders. Your image of what China is like is just completely out of date.