Читать книгу The Best-Laid Plans - Randal O'Toole - Страница 5

In proving foresight may be vain;

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!

—Robert Burns

Somewhere in the United States today, government officials are writing a plan that will profoundly affect other people’s lives, incomes, and property. Though it may be written with the best intentions, the plan will go horribly wrong. The costs will be far higher than anticipated, the benefits will prove far smaller, and various unintended consequences will turn out to be worse than even the plan’s critics predicted.

People might blame the plan’s failure on the officials who wrote it, who may lose their jobs or be voted out of office. More likely, officials and planners will shift the blame to outside circumstances. Who could have known that costs would rise? That new technologies would render the plan useless or pointless? Or that people wouldn’t behave in the ways planners expected? Even more likely, few members of the public will even notice that the plan failed because few will remember what the plan said or that it was written at all. Instead, increased traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, declining employment, or other consequences of the plan will be considered “just one of those things.”

Few will blame any of these problems on the concept of government planning itself. Government planning has become an accepted part of life in these United States. Almost every city and county in the nation has a planning department and many states have laws requiring cities and counties to plan. Running government without planners seems almost as foreign as running marathons without air to breathe.

Yet government planning almost always leads to disaster because government planning is simply not possible. As part two of this book will reveal, the task is too big for anyone to understand and the planning process is too slow to keep up with the realities of modern life. Part four will show that most of the professionals who call themselves planners are poorly trained to do the work they set out to do. Even if scientific planning were possible and the right people were doing it, part six will show that politics inevitably distort the results into something totally irrational.

Fifteen years ago, Americans cheered the victory of free markets over the centralized planning that failed so miserably in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Yet we have already forgotten these stark lessons about the impracticality of government planning. Even as government officials in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were trying to figure out how to restore free markets to their once-planned economies, planners in the United States were seeking greater influence over land use, transportation, health care, energy, and other aspects of our economy. As Boris Yeltsin faced down the tanks of an attempted coup in 1991, the U.S. Congress was passing a law that gave planners more control than ever over our cities and the people who live in them.¹

Today, the negative consequences of that law and planning in general can be felt in housing bubbles, increased traffic congestion, growing restrictions on what people are allowed to do with their property, and declining employment in some urban areas that should be rapidly growing. Yet planners manage to blame congestion on people who drive alone instead of taking transit; unaffordable housing on speculators and low interest rates; and unemployment on greedy corporations outsourcing to other parts of the world. Few place the real blame where it belongs: in the laps of planners who deliberately created the congestion, cheerfully drove up housing prices, and eagerly wrote regulations hostile to local businesses.

Everybody plans. You plan your day, your vacation, your education, and your career. Companies plan their product releases and long-term strategies. But the planning that is the subject of this book is government planning, that is, government officials and planners making decisions about your life, your property, and your future.

I want to further distinguish between broad-based government planning and mission planning. Government agencies whose missions are both clear and narrowly defined need to organize their resources to carry out those missions, and such organization might be called planning. Such flexible, short-term mission planning is a necessary part of any organization. Instead, as used here, government planning refers to three kinds of planning:

• Comprehensive planning that attempts to deal with both quantifiable (but not always comparable) values, such as dollars, recreation days, or transit trips, and qualitative values, such as “a sense of community.” The noncomparable and qualitative nature of comprehensive planning allows or even forces planners and special interest groups to put their own preferences ahead of what the public wants or needs. Part one of this book will show how the U.S. Forest Service spent more than a billion dollars comprehensively planning the national forests and ended up with plans that were obsolete before they were published because political, social, and scientific realities changed faster than the planners could write.

• Planning of other people’s land and resources, which always fails because planners do not have to pay the costs that they impose on other people and so they have little incentive to find the best answers. Part three will show how state and city land-use planning has made housing unaffordable in many regions and has driven up the cost of most other businesses as well.

• Long-range planning that attempts to dictate activities 10, 20, or more years in the future. Long-range planning always fails because no one can predict the future and so, as with comprehensive planning, it leads planners to write their preferences into the plan and gives opportunities for special interest groups to manipulate the plan for their own benefit. Part five will show how many long-range transportation plans written for the nation’s metropolitan areas ended up favoring a tiny minority of the residents of those areas at everyone else’s expense.

There are several important differences between private planning and government planning. When you plan, you are primarily deciding how to use your time, your money, and your property. The costs of any mistakes you make will fall mainly on you, so you have an incentive to get it right. When government agencies plan, they are making decisions about other people’s time, money, and property. When the planners make mistakes, someone else bears the costs, so planners have little incentive to get it right. As a result, they often repeat their mistakes.

Second, because your time, money, and property are your own, few people other than members of your family have a significant interest in the decisions you make. Government planning agencies, however, have the power to make people very wealthy or send them into bankruptcy. This kind of power attracts people, corporations, and interest groups who will put enormous pressure on the agencies and the elected officials who oversee them to see that the plans work in their favor. This pressure inevitably distorts the planning process into something other than the rational system planners claim it to be.

A third difference between private and government planning is flexibility. If your boss offers to take you to lunch at Benihana, you won’t hesitate to abandon the peanut butter and jelly sandwich you planned to eat. If your rich uncle offers to take you to Hawaii next summer, you don’t say, “No, I was planning to do my laundry that week.” If Toyota or Ford makes a car that no one buys, it can switch production to a more popular model.

Government planning agencies lack this flexibility. Once a plan has been written, it is almost impossible to change because the interest groups that benefit from that plan have an incentive to ensure it is followed to the letter. In fact, the preparation of a plan often leads to the formation of new special interest groups aimed solely at enforcing the plan. Many planners welcome these interest groups, because what is the point of spending years writing a perfect plan if politicians can ignore it or change it the next day?

This doesn’t mean that the plan will be followed. It usually doesn’t take long after a plan has been written for reality to intrude and either the agencies charged with its implementation or the people affected by the plan to realize it isn’t going to work. The best-case scenario is that the agencies abandon the plan. The more likely case, however, is that they try to implement the plan anyway and those people affected by it respond in unexpected ways so that the outcome differs completely from what was planned.

When I first began studying issues related to federal lands, urban growth, and transportation, I thought I was dealing with questions of policy. But I soon realized that what tied these and many other issues together is that elected officials have turned these issues over to the planners. To the extent that elected officials create policy, it is haphazard and usually a side effect of some budgetary compromise. The planners respond to these indiscriminate budgetary incentives and overlay them with their own preferences. The results are far from the rational planning promised by the textbooks.

Whether it is urban growth, air pollution, traffic congestion, or national forest management, planners advertise their method as the solution to any problem or controversy. This is attractive to elected officials who gladly turn thorny issues over to the bureaucracy rather than make the decisions—and take the heat—themselves. Planning bureaucracies, in turn, are run by the tens of thousands of well-intentioned but often clueless people called planners who, having graduated from architecture schools and other universities, are eager to bring their visions of utopia to the American people.

The bitter irony, freely admitted by numerous planners, is that many if not most of the problems that the planners propose to solve were caused not by the free marketplace, but by past generations of planners and other government bureaucrats. Instead of trying to figure out how to make the market work, planners today seek even more power to act as a substitute for the market and attempt to solve the problems created when their predecessors interfered with that market.

This leads to round after endless round of failed plans, each imposing more restrictive rules on and more costly fixes to the previous plans. The plans waste the time of people who try to participate in the planning process and impose huge costs on the people who are ultimately burdened with more taxes to pay for the plans and then suffer a lower quality of life that results from the plans.

Even if planning worked, almost every problem that plans are supposed to address can be more easily solved through other means. Part seven will present guidelines and examples of how to do that. The main barrier is often just the inertia that accompanies the status quo.

Americans routinely translate the Robert Burns poem that introduces this book as “the best-laid plans of mice and men.” Yet the word that Burns uses is “scheme.” My dictionary reveals that in the United Kingdom, including Canada, Australia, and Burns’s Scotland, “scheme” means “a plan, policy, or program carried out by a government or business.” But in the United States, the dictionary adds, “scheme” has a dark undertone; it is “a secret and cunning plan, especially one designed to cause damage or harm.”² British politicians may scheme to their hearts’ content, but American politicians caught scheming are soon voted out of office if they don’t resign first.

The ultimate goal of this book is to inspire federal, state, and local governments to repeal planning laws and shut down their planning departments as not only a burden on taxpayers but also a source of costly mistakes. In the short run, I will consider this book a success if it leads more people to view long-range, comprehensive government planning with the same suspicion they give to cunning and sinister schemes.