I promised a few posts about planning, and here is the first of them. The basic objections to planning are well-known. The power of these objections does not lie in a general recitation; it is in specific application, showing how planning falls short of alternative, market solutions, that these objections are most interesting.
Here are a few introductory points.
Government Planning. Planning in this context refers to government planning. It’s indisputable that people can, and should, plan certain affairs. Objections to planning are not objections to mere human action and design — they are objections to human action through design where a market could operate. Neither private list-making, nor calendar-scheduling, constitutes planning, in any event. Planning in this context refers to human action and design of politicians, officials, and bureaucrats.
(By the way, when I discuss planning, and planners, I am not referring to a single person or position. It’s a role and disposition — held by more than one in and out of government — that I’m describing. My remarks are not specific to City Planner Ryan Garcia, or any consultant that the city may have once used, or may use to supplement Garcia’s work on certain projects.)
Planning to Compete. It’s also true that some level of planning is necessary to adopt basic laws of contract, or other laws that describe the rules of the game. That’s not what’s at state in the objections to planning. That’s merely planning to compete; it’s planing to produce an outcome that’s the disputed matter. Planners seeking a result are by nature utopian: they contend that they’ll create a better world by design. Those advocating a spontaneous order have no fixed result in mind — we’ll not seek to engineer a result, as we believe it can be done neither well nor fairly.
That’s why — when someone contends that a planning group is the arbiter (not mediator, but arbiter) of the community’s values — that libertarians find that bold statement undesirable and more than a bit arrogant.
Planning Characteristics. Government planning has a few simple characteristics: it is human action, by design, involving regulation of property that politicians or bureaucrats themselves did not earn, and property about which they are less familiar — by sheer circumstance, proximity, and often skill of acquisition — than those who did earn it. The public nature of government planning will attract a greater notice, and by consequence a greater potential for special interests and special pleaders, than private activity. The planner will be convinced — if acting sincerely — that he can decide about the property’s use better through design than through the operation of a market.
It is on this point last point — about the better use through planning than through a market — that the dispute against planning lies. Objections to planning, and in favor of a spontaneous order — have two main, connected components: planning is less efficient (its many conceits notwithstanding), and planning reduces the scope of individual freedom.
Markets. A market, by the way, may be described variously as simply a market, an emergent phenomenon, or a spontaneous order. These fancy terms do not mean the same thing, always (and are used variously by different people). No matter: the market forces that I am describing really mean forces that are the result of human action, but not design. An engineer designed your car, but our language did not involve by design. We speak the language, and use it intelligibly among ourselves, without a designer. We do not have a Department of New Words, yet new words enter our common language every day.
Limits and Comparative Advantages. Markets will not develop where there is only one actor, or where the is no desire for common activity. One ties one’s shoes alone, by individual skill and action — that’s not a market matter. (The division of labor’s not that specialized.) Nor do I even remotely believe that markets are perfect, or will work only in circumstances or perfect information, or work perfectly in each and every case. It’s only necessary that they work better, when conditions are suitable, than government planning.
We are convinced that no number of people, however well-intentioned, intelligent, and educated will be able to design so well and so efficiently as a spontaneous order without design. That’s why we contend that its merely a conceit — well-intentioned in America, detestable in extreme forms abroad — that the planner can manage so well as a market.
In subsequent posts, I’ll look at planning for our downtown, walkable urbanity, a moratorium on downtown residential first-floor housing, how community and business special interests influence public decisions, tax incremental financing, and the risks of a planning culture.