Category Archives: Mission

Today Americans celebrate independence from a foreign nation and, more generally, freedom from tyranny. Regular readers of the Antiplanner won’t have to guess what I think about that.

Fireworks over the Willamette River, July 3, 2007.
Flickr photo copyright 2007 by Sean Dreilinger.

All my life, I’ve wondered about the relationship between the individual and society. When do the needs of the community trump individual freedom? Henry David Thoreau gave his answer in his famous essay, Civil Disobedience:

“I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men.”

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A news item refers to a recent research study that asks how far ahead people plan. The experiment asked people to make decisions at two points. Those who made what appeared to be the best decision at the first point found that they lost out at the second point. Only those who looked ahead to the second point would make the best decision at the first point.

The study found that 36 percent of people made the wrong decision at the first point. People wanted to make the right decision; at the second point, 97 percent made the right decision. But more than half failed to look ahead to see the effect of their first decision on the second point.

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What makes a city or region a great place to live? Certainly climate and proximity to stunning scenic vistas are important, but they are beyond our control. Of the things that are within our control, what most contributes to livability? If there is more than one factor, how would you rank them?

I hope the many experts who read this will all present their answers. It would be helpful, though not essential, if your answers were:

1. Quantifiable
2. Available through some published database
3. Outputs rather than inputs

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But these are guidelines. I invite all possible answers.

Today we are supposed to remember the men and women who gave their lives to protect America’s freedoms. But I would also like to remember some of the freedoms that we have lost thanks to planning.

Who should get to decide how this land is used — the owner or the government?
Flickr photo by Kacey97007

First among these is the freedom to own property without fear that it will be taken without compensation. Though this freedom is enshrined in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, it has largely disappeared thanks to the Supreme Court.

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Many libertarians argue that state governments do a better job than the federal government, and local governments are the best of all. Anyone who has dealt with a city council or planning commission, however, soon realizes that cities can be as inefficient and undemocratic as the feds.

Advocates of small government argue that government would work better if only it weren’t so large. Yet students of nineteenth century American history know that the federal government, though tiny then compared with today, was subject to proportionately as much pork barrel and waste as it is today.

After more than three decades looking at government and government planning, I’ve come to realize the flaw in these arguments. And so I’ve formulated the Antiplanner’s Law of Good Government.

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Sometime in the late eighteenth century, Robert Burns drove a plough through a field mouse’s nest. He could see that the mouse had worked hard to build the nest, and he had destroyed all that work in an instant. As an apology, he wrote the poem titled, “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, With The Plough,” containing the following stanza:

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!”

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