Category Archives: Why Planning Fails

As the Antiplanner has traveled and visited people all over the country, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon. Though I’ve met thousands of suburban and rural residents who are very happy with their homes and lifestyles, I’ve never met one who thinks the power of government should be used to force others to live in the same lifestyle. Yet I’ve met lots of urban residents who openly admit that they believe their lifestyle is so perfect that government should force more if not most people to live in dense, “walkable” cities.

Do cities turn people into liberal fascists? Or do liberal fascists naturally congregate into cities, and if so, why?

A general description of the phenomenon I’ve observed can be found in Thomas Sowell’s 1995 book, The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell says that America’s liberal elites view themselves as smarter or more insightful than everyone else, and thus qualified to impose their ideas on everyone else. The process of doing so, says Sowell, follows four steps (p. 8):

Continue reading →

Yesterday, I received a “Social Security Statement,” which is supposed to look like some sort of pension statement — only it is not. A pension statement shows how much money workers put into their pensions, how much that money is earning in interest, and how much they can take out.

The Social Security Statement also showed how much I put into the social security and medicare funds — to be honest, not very much, because for most of my career I worked for nearly nothing. But it doesn’t tell how much interest “my” money is earning, because of course the money is all gone — Congress spent it on something else.

“In 2017 we will begin paying more in benefits than we collect in taxes,” says the statement. “Without changes, by 2041 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted.” (Actually, the latest numbers say it will run out four years sooner.) But what is the Social Security Trust Fund? It is a big fat, $2.4 trilllion IOU from Congress, which expects to repay that IOU by borrowing from someone else, or raising taxes, after 2017.

Continue reading →

Back in 2005, biofuels were all the rage, so some member of Congress came up with a great idea: give huge tax breaks to anyone who starts using a combination of Diesel and biofuels. That will help save petroleum and reduce greenhouse gases!

Eventually, paper manufacturers notice the law and so they begin mixing biofuels with Diesel fuels in making paper. Pretty soon they are collecting $8 billion in tax credits a year.

In some cases, the doctors levitra viagra cialis provide first-aid for temporary relief. So, one can give a try to how to resolve them avoiding going to a professional’s office or undertaking low cost cialis click that seanamic.com any radical means. That sexual stimulation is as vital as the color, size and shape of the pills, they may give the cialis on line purchase final clue to have a correct illegal drug identification. Basically duration got along with, more insulins had viagra price usa been generated that most lasted much more time, looking for a fewer amount of injection therapy, however which requires tight consideration within order to clocking involving meals. The only problem? Before this law was passed, they were using 100 percent biofuels. Now, thanks to a stupid law, we are paying them to waste Diesel.

I know what you are going to say: the law could have been written to specify tax break only for people or companies substituting biofuel for petroleum fuel. But it doesn’t matter; there are always unintended consequences and they usually, if not always, end up doing more harm than the intended good.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from the Antiplanner, whose ancestors were mostly Irish (with some Welsh thrown in). Some people try to find the pot at the end of the rainbow, but right now I am trying to find out what happened to the “rational” in rational planning.

It is the Antiplanner’s official position that long-range government planning cannot work no way no how. But it is a mark of how bankrupt the planning profession has become that many of its members never seem to bother to follow its standard planning system, which is known as the Rational Planning Model.

As defined by that noted authority, Wikipedia, the Rational Planning Model “is the process of realizing a problem, establishing and evaluating planning criteria, create alternatives, implementing alternatives, and monitoring progress of the alternatives.” This model, Wikipedia adds, “is central in the development of modern urban planning.”

If it is so central, then why do so few urban planners follow it? In particular, most plans that I have reviewed leave out step 3, “create alternatives.” They also leave out what should be step 4 (but which goes unmentioned by Wikipedia), evaluate alternatives. Which isn’t surprising if they don’t have any alternatives to evaluate.

Continue reading →

A few years ago, Al Franken wrote a “satire on the breakdown of civility in public discourse.” He called it, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. Franken’s point was that Limbaugh became popular by polarizing people. Franken made that point by writing as polarizing a book as possible.

We see this polarization in the current presidential campaign. Obama has become popular because he promises a way out of the polarization. Hillary’s response is to polarize Democratic voters against Obama, and it seems to have worked: two weeks ago, polls showed that Hillary supporters would vote for Obama if he became the nominee; after the Texas-Ohio primaries, polls showed her supporters to be more hostile of him.

Continue reading →

Last month, a strange new ad appeared on your television sets.

In case you don’t have a fast connection, the following words roll up the screen over the image of a beauty pageant:

Why are we sitting watching I Wanna be the Galaxy’s Best Supernova Diva Star?
Dutifully phoning in our votes for the next big thing while we wait on our couches to die.
Continue in this so-called democracy and you just might stop thinking for yourself
That’s when you are officially dead.

Continue reading →