It isn't "crazy" to suppose, as de Tocqueville does, that the free market (like the fisherman of 'rude attainments') may have thought of something we didn't think of. Of course you are right about buildings being several stories tall and not expandable are made of stone. Therefore... the free market makes city buildings out of stone, even in the ignorant USA. Big city buildings are stone, big ocean ships are metal, small homes in countrysides are wood, and small small boats are still made of wood, even in the USA. The broader point is that someone as intelligent as Alexis dT could be surprised, for all his education, that the free market had made a rational decision. The original post is the equivalent of saying that small fishing boats should be made of metal. The argument is whether building codes and other social engineering will outperform the free market. The question is especially dangerous when the code developer has a quasi-religious approach, a moral certitude. It would be an environmental waste to make small boats out of metal boats. They'd be sturdier, but the amount of carbon and fossil fuels wasted by mining and refining ores to make heavy, slow, small metal boats would be a waste (though probably supported by the metal mining industry). USA has other problems with its wooden structure model, such as "urban sprawl"... I don't think the free market is perfect, but "command and control" scares me, especially when it's promoted by factoids and math that dazzle non-engineers, and are used to support a pompous argument over homebuilding material. Your math of finite resources is exactly on point... But you are using the math on finite resources to promote the theory that European command and control will protect those resources better than the free market. That's the argument central to TFA... Was the free market stupid, or would "solving" it just as likely lead to stone buildings in the countryside and small metal boats?
