All people make plans for the future, even if that should be no farther ahead than for later the same day.
Why specifically, though, should government plan? Every city has plans for development, plans for budgeting, and many (as we do in Whitewater) have a public commission with lawful authority to approve or reject certain private construction or mercantile proposals.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission, I think, has a choice before it: will you establish fair rules by which private parties can engage in entrepreneurial activity, or will you pick and choose who succeeds and fails, at the outset?
It’s the oft-repeated distinction between planning for others to compete and planning to control competition. Watching Whitewater’s Planning Commission, it’s clear that some commissioners would like merely to establish fair rules, and others feel a right to engineer specific results, including preventing entrepreneurs from building and creating in response to consumer demand.
Commissioners who feel they have a right to stop projects based on their personal preferences, or even the authority to stop projects because as appointees they may decide the destiny of others rather than allowing consumers to decide for themselves, overstep legitimate, responsible authority.
Hayek, among so many others since, saw the difference between government planning to facilitate any number of private, voluntary possibilities and planning of a few to compel particular outcomes. Here, from his Road to Serfdom, are succinct expressions of his views:
“PLANNING” owes its popularity largely to the fact that everybody desires, of course, that we should handle our common problems with as much foresight as possible. The dispute between the modern planners and the liberals is not on whether we ought to employ systematic thinking in planning our affairs. It is a dispute about what is the best way of so doing. The question is whether we should create conditions under which the knowledge and initiative of individuals are given the best scope so that they can plan most successfully; or whether we should direct and organize all economic activities according to a “blue-print,” that is, “consciously direct the resources of society to conform to the planners’ particular views of who should have what.
One might describe this as a case for limited planning, and for expansive private activity. Hayek draws this distinction:
It is important not to confuse opposition against the latter kind of planning [of state-mandated outcomes] with a dogmatic laissez faire attitude.
The liberal argument does not advocate leaving things just as they are; it favors making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of coordinating human efforts. It is based on the conviction that, where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other. It emphasizes that in order to make competition work beneficially a carefully thought-out legal framework is required, and that neither the past nor the existing legal rules are free from grave defects.
Liberalism is opposed, however, to supplanting competition by inferior methods of guiding economic activity. And it regards competition as superior not only because in most circumstances it is the most efficient method known but because it is the only method which does not require the coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority.
The case for a liberal, private order rests on arguments of efficiency and morality.
Conditions are better, in both ways, when one is free.
Whitewater will be more prosperous when planning returns to its proper, limited, responsible role. We’ll not have broad-based growth – we’ll not be both hipper and more prosperous – until then.
Many can achieve here, but only under conditions of political and regulatory restraint.