Centralized government planning is almost always a disaster, says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole, who warns of the dangers of letting government bureaucrats take more and more control over Americans’ lives. A generation ago, we laughed at the hilariously predictable failures of the Soviet Union’s five-year plans. Now we’re allowing our own public planners, two-thirds of whom work for state and local governments, to design our communities, manage our land and natural resources, design our transportation and energy grids, run our health care system and oversee much else.
Big mistake. In his new book, “The Best-Laid Plans,” O’Toole documents example after example of government planning gone hideously awry, starting with his hometown of Portland, Ore. — the home of the “Smart Growth” movement. But Portland’s artificial urban growth boundary sent housing prices spiraling in the once-affordable city and dramatically increased urban sprawl — the very ills smart-growth policies are supposed to prevent.
Washington-area residents should be particularly suspicious of the current push for “walkable communities,” an idea championed by idealistic English planners in the 1970s who created an extensive network of bucolic garden paths in various new subdivisions, only to have criminals become their design’s main beneficiaries. Similarly, in a chapter on “Smart Growth and Crime,” O’Toole points out how New Urbanism — a popular planning approach that promotes high-density, mixed-use development and increased pedestrian and bike traffic — also inevitably promotes crime, which is far more prevalent in urban settings than lower-density residential neighborhoods.
O’Toole demolishes the widely held belief that government planners are somehow smarter or more capable of managing the future than market forces. In fact, even the planners themselves don’t believe the hype. “The bitter irony, freely admitted by numerous planners,” O’Toole writes, ” 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.”
Name a contemporary problem — traffic congestion, homelessness, lack of affordable housing — all can be traced back to past government planning mistakes. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many Americans still expect the planners to miraculously get it right the next time around. Better to fire the planners and let free people, free minds and free markets use the genius of their freedom.
