Questing for Atlantis

Now that Gov. O’Malley has implemented PlanMaryland via executive order, more than a little ink and plenty of angst has been spilled over it.

It’s been declaimed as part of a War on Rural Maryland, an example of executive overreach, an assault on private property rights, and an effort to undermine local planning boards. All of these are true characterizations of PlanMaryland, but they’re also all wrong.

Alright, they’re not exactly wrong. But they miss the real problem and in doing so the obscure the real issue with PlanMaryland. Simply put, the real complaint against PlanMaryland isn’t what it proposes to do, it’s that it proposes to do.

Take a moment and pick up one of the pencils that is undoubtedly on your desk. Consider it for a moment. Just how did it come to be there?

This is a question explored in the famous essay “I, Pencil.” As Leonard Reed, its author explains, not a person in the world knows how to make a simple pencil. Simply obtaining the raw wood alone is a monumental task, requiring the coordination of hundreds of people and skills – not just to cut the wood, but the mine and smelt the saws and other tools, to grow hemp and make it into rope, to run and maintain the lumber camp, even to make the coffee the lumberjacks drink.

As a simple a task as that would seem, it only continues to grow more complex. To transport the wood, to mill it, to fill with graphite and finish the pencils, to ship it to stores across the world, to produce the energy that powers all of this and to generate the capital that finances it all – all of this involves the unplanned coordination of untold thousands and thousands of people.

With such awe-inspiring complexity, what person in the world could ever make a pencil on their own. And in a vacuum, without the way having been shown first, what person or even group of people could ever centrally plan the process? What minds could ever conceive of, much less manage such an intricate and intertwined system, one that spans not just countless humans across the globe but across time as well.

The answer is simple, none could, and only a fool would think they could.

But if the creation of a pencil is such a complex process, how much more complex is a whole house. And how much more complex a community, or the network of communities we call counties? And for someone to think that one person or even a committee could mastermind the collection of counties we think of as a state?

What hubris. What bald-faced arrogance.

But, in spite of his egotistical belief that government is up to the task of capably managing a system of such infinite complexity, Gov. O’Malley doesn’t deserve all the blame. We all need to accept our share as well. I’ll explain why in Part II.