The Antiplanner is glad to see that Republicans decided to take my advice and back off on the showdown over the debt ceiling. But this still leaves the question of why our government is suffering from so much gridlock and how we can prevent it in the future.

Fortunately, left-leaning journalist Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post has some answers. Apparently, gridlock is all the fault of the tea parties. The tea parties forced the House to pass a “no-earmarks” rule, which means Congressional leaders can’t use earmarks to bribe members of Congress to vote for stupid laws.

Second, tea parties (and others) have forced Congress to make its decisions transparent, that is, open to public scrutiny. The inability of members to make back-room deals is apparently reducing Congress’ ability to function.

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A few weeks ago, pundits were predicting dire consequences if the government shut down. As near as I can tell, except for the National Park Service acting more thuggish than usual, nothing really happened. People are still getting their social security checks. American soldiers are still getting killed in Afghanistan. Some government web sites have annoyingly shut down, as if it costs more to run a web site that provides information than it does to operate a site that only says it will refuse to provide that information.

national debt
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This debt clock seems to be off, as the current debt ceiling is just under $16.7 trillion. But it shows how fast Congress is spending money.

Now the predictions about what will happen if Congress refuses to increase the debt ceiling are even more dire. I don’t really buy that either. Investors know that this is just a political spat; if they believe that the United States can support more than $16.7 trillion worth of debt, they’ll believe it just as much a few weeks from now as today.

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In Triumph of the City, Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser argued that dense cities were still important even in the age of telecommuting and the Internet because of the importance of face-to-face contacts. For this reason, while Glaeser didn’t support subsidies for density, he still expected to see dense cities well into the future.

The Antiplanner disagreed. “Thanks to the automobile, we can have such face-to-face contact with far more people, and a greater diversity of people, than those who are within walking distance of a Manhattan high rise. Thanks to the Internet, we can dispense with face-to-face contacts when doing such routine things as shopping and many types of work. In other words, the economic forces that built dense cities such as London and New York are far weaker today.”

In this light, it was interesting to read yesterday’s report in the Wall Street Journal that New York banks are moving many employees well out of Manhattan (if this link doesn’t work, Google “New York Banks Cut and Run”). After the financial crisis, the city’s ten largest banks reduced their Manhattan rental space from 38 million to 32 million square feet. Property owners hoped that they would pick up that space as the economy recovered, but instead they are moving people to lower-cost areas such as Florida.

“The new reality is that you do most of your work by phone,” says an employee of Deutsche Bank who works in Jacksonville (if this link doesn’t work, search for “Deutsche Bankers Warm Up to Florida”). “Why can’t we do that in a location with a better cost of living?”

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Matthew Yglesias observes that, because of the government shutdown, farmers don’t know how much pigs are worth. The USDA normally keeps track of and publishes pork prices. Yglesias concludes that the government shutdown is threatening our farm economy.

The correctly conclusion, however, is that we should let the unreliable government do things that can be done by private parties. If USDA weren’t publishing pork prices, someone else would, and they would not have to rely on a continued flow of tax dollars to keep them going.
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Despite the government shutdown, the Antiplanner managed to safely get to Bakersfield, California yesterday to give a presentation on why high-speed rail won’t relieve congestion and what we should do instead. Interested people can download a 14.6-MB PDF of this presentation with notes summarizing my narration. Although the original presentation included videos of driverless cars, I didn’t include them in the PDF, but you can download them in this 10-MB zip file.