Questing for Atlantis

In the previous installment, I made clear the unbelievable amount of arrogance it takes to think that the production of a single pencil could be centrally planned, much less the land use policy of an entire state.

However I also made the more controversial claim, that Gov. O’Malley doesn’t deserve all the blame for implementing such a foolish plan, that we all need to take ownership of this folly.

To understand why, look back to our friend the pencil. Remember how complex the process of his manufacture is? And think about how much more complex it is therefore to make something much more complex, like a house or a community.

Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek had many great insights, but his greatest insight was with regards to the astounding complexity of our economy, the ways in which it spontaneously ordered itself, and the folly of trying to centrally plan that economy.

Simply put, Hayek’s great insight was that the economy, and even small sectors of it, are too complex to be centrally planned. The myriad needs and desires of all the individuals who make up the economy simply present too many variables to be accounted for by any person or board.

As a result, when such central planning is attempted, it will inevitably fail. Planners will allocate too little in one area, too much in another, ignore people’s desires and instead force their own preferences. And when the planning fails, how do the planners respond?

Once in a blue moon, they recognize their mistake and roll back their initial planning, allowing the spontaneous ordering of the market to address the issue. More often though, they insist the failure was not theirs, that all that is needed to fix the problem is yet more planning.

In this way, planning begets yet more planning, and what started as relatively minor and benign escalates into massive assaults on individual liberty.

The situation is no different here in Maryland. PlanMaryland did not emerge out of whole cloth from the ether. It is the product of a natural evolution that began the day Marylanders accepted government planning of land use policy via zoning laws and other ordinances controlling land use policy.

Had we protested earlier, refused to accept the lesser invasion of private property rights, then we would never be facing the much larger assault that is PlanMaryland. But it’s not too late, we can fight off PlanMaryland, but we can’t stop there, we need to continue to push forward and rollback zoning ordinances, comprehensive plans, and all the other intrusions on the free exercise of private property rights in Maryland.

And contrary to what some might say, not only can a place survive without government planned land use policy, it can thrive. I’ll explain that in Part III.