Wildfires in California are caused by bureaucracy. That’s not the claim of some rabid free marketeer such as myself but of ProPublica, a significantly less froth-at-the-mouth-inclined organization than others in the media.
Still, that’s also not quite what ProPublica says but rather that the damage caused by big wildfires is caused by California’s interlocking and self-confusing layers of bureaucrats who can’t manage forestry.
The basic point to understand is something I have mentioned before. In a Mediterranean climate, of the type California has, the environment has evolved to burn on a regular basis. How much it will burn in any one year depends, in the normal course of things, on how much rain there was the winter before. That’s when the flora, which will dry and then burn, grows. The more rain there is, the more growth.
This would therefore be a bad fire year given the wetter-than-average winter. What makes the fires worse, though, is a buildup of such dry brush over the years or a whole century of not allowing burns to take care of it.
This is the point that ProPublica makes, and it is right to do so. We know what to do with the California wildfires. Have more of them, more regularly, so as to ensure that each one is minor and equates to what the environment itself is evolved to deal with. Do not, as has been done, stamp out every brush burning in the thought that we’re saving a fire-resistant ecology.
The firefighters know this, and the sensible ecologists do, too. It’s just that California governance doesn’t allow it. Try to do a controlled burn, and there are too many people to please to be able to do it often enough and at the required scale. There are too many bureaucrats, all enforcing their small part of the overall net of regulations.
There is no management solution to this, either. One cannot treat the symptoms. It is as with a solid cancer: It must be excised. Simply abolishing several to many layers of liberal governance is the only thing that can be done. The Roman solution to Carthage, which was to level the buildings, sell the workforce into bondage, and plow the land with salt, would be the most cathartic but perhaps a touch extreme.
This is a warning to the rest of us outside the Golden State, too. Yes, there are problems that need to be solved, and it’s even true that there are problems that should be solved and can be solved by government. But it is also possible to have too much government so that solutions cannot be enacted. The answer is to have less of that oversight of life by the bureaucracy. That is, if we are to be radical about government, we need to acknowledge that often enough, that means less of it.
For the example being presented to us here, California’s vision of the future is that there is nowhere so naturally blessed that it cannot be ruined by big government, which is why so many are leaving the place. What’s really repeatedly going up in smoke is the idea that politics is a useful manner of managing society in detail. It simply doesn’t work.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
