The Best-Laid Plans. Randal O'Toole

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.

      Part One

      Forest Planning

      Once we have seen how simplification, legibility, and manipulation operate in forest management, we can then explore how the modern state applies a similar lens to urban planning, rural settlement, land administration, and agriculture.

      —James C. Scott¹

      Between 1952 and 1976, the Forest Service went from being one of the most popular agencies in government to one of the most controversial, with debates raging over clearcutting, road construction, herbicide spraying, grazing, mining, and other activities on the nation’s 193 million acres of national forests. Senator Hubert Humphrey thought that the controversies could be resolved by having each national forest write a comprehensive, long-range plan. Each plan would rationally consider all the various competing resources and alternative ways of managing the forests and would find the alternative that maximized net public benefits. Humphrey also expected that the national forests would revise their plans every 10 to 15 years.

      When Humphrey’s legislation passed in 1976, the Forest Service estimated that it could write the plans in four years at a cost of about $120 million. Fifteen years later, the agency had spent at least 10 times that much on planning and some of the plans were still unfinished.

      • Far from resolving controversies, the plans created opportunities for interest group leaders to further polarize the public.

      • Far from rational planning, the plans often relied on fabricated data and