I’m not sure if anyone here said that the government should perform this level of micromanagement of the economy.
It just appears that free market worshippers were asked to acknowledge that in certain instances, the free market is less efficient than a planned one, (by whom and for whom, it doesn’t matter.) It doesn’t necessarily follow that it is worth it to curtail liberty in the name of market efficiency.
I’m not sure if this is a case of market inefficiency, though. People attach a value to living in a “real” home versus a mobile one, and the happiness they get out of it for the 5-10 years it will be used for might surpass the “waste” in material and labor.
Waste is waste. It means less available for everybody. If people are wasteful with heating in their own homes then via supply and demand everyone pays more for fuel. People with leaky houses waste your money just surely as a leaky government building. The only difference is they do it by market force instead of government force.
Now you could argue you don’t have to buy things, but you do have to pay taxes, but this ignores there’s certain commodities where demand isn’t exactly optional.
If I choose not put gas in my car then I choose not to be able to go to work, and I choose not be able to feed myself. Not really a choice. Therefore people who waste gas choose to drive the price up and make me spend more. The Free Market thought 9 mpg SUVs and autos that need a limited resource would be a good idea.
It was wrong. It created massive waste. It’s wasting my money every time I fill up. Just as unavoidable as taxes.
What your remarks have rather plainly demonstrated is that you don’t understand what it means to be economically wasteful. The temporary housing is only wasteful or inefficient if the costs of erecting that housing (including any externalities) exceeds the value of the resource extraction enterprise. As you have no figures as to either the costs of the housing or the profits of the companies or any possible externalities, a person can only conclude that you think this is economically inefficient because you have mistaken shorter than usual expected occupancy for inefficiency. Or in other words, because you fundamentally misunderstand the concept of inefficiency. Indeed, it seems you are basing your entire critique on a rather simple-minded idea regarding how long a person ought to live in a given house.
Protip: paragraphs are free. Learn to use them in your condescending screeds.
Here’s the deal, as John Mace kindly pointed out there’s less wasteful alternatives to permanent housing in this situation. Now again I don’t think the government should micromanage housing, but clearly the Free Market isn’t running this as efficiently as it could.
You say it’s only wasteful if the costs exceed the profits. That’s dumb. Say you have goal X. Accomplishing goal X gets you 50 quatloos. Method A satisfactory accomplishes goal X for 40 quatloos, and goal B satisfactorily accomplishes goal X for 20 quatloos. Both methods have equal external costs. By what rights would using method A not be wasteful?
Interesting thread…ND had been losing population before the oil boom came. Frankly, it is a difficult place to live in…windswept, cold and long winters, nothing to do except farm. So the oil boom brought a lot of employment.
The houses built for the new people will probably be abandoned when the oil runs out…nless people all of a sudden decide they like to live there (if the cost of living is low enough, maybe they can attract retirees).
But I would not count on it.
Will Williston become a ghost town? No, but there will be a lot of empty houses.
It will be like a lot of abandoned/closed military bases…like Loring AFB in Maine-the town went from fairly big to ghost town in 20 years.