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.

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.