An abhorrent failure by any other name

I have discussed in the past how the authoritarian and totalitarian soul is revealed whenever some public policy has "Zero" as its performance measure.  Zero Covid is the obvious example.  Zero Covid became the authoritarian and totalitarian goal and all our constitutional liberties went out the window.  

Vision Zero is another example.  The laudable goal of reducing traffic deaths to zero is always, and virtually necessarily, accompanied either by gross violations of constitutional law or the totally ignoring of actual objectives of voters.

Zero inflation, zero unemployment, zero crime, zero infant mortality, zero obesity.  Anything zero necessarily means someone within government has the power to override the civil rights and choices of citizens.  It is tautological.  No matter how noble the objective, if it is Zero, then it requires totalitarian authoritarianism.

I am reminded of this this morning glancing at Sentences of the Day by  Alex Tabarrok.  

The Washington Post on the plan to refurbish Union Station in DC:

The federal environmental review of the project, which began in 2015, is at least three years behind schedule. Once the federal approval process is complete, a design phase is likely to take several years, project officials said, possibly followed by 13 years of construction.

A good example of the Ezra Klein point about the costs of everything bagel liberalism. By the way, the push to eliminate more than a thousand parking spots at the station seems counter-productive. I’m not a fan of parking minimums but in typical liberal fashion that has been turned into an anti-parking, anti-car crusade regardless of context. In fact, a railroad station is precisely where you do want parking to avoid the last mile(s) problem and encourage rail use.

Democratic planners across the nation are immensely hostile to private ownership of cars.  They really prefer that everyone ride public mass transit even though only about 5% of citizens choose to rely on mass transit even for just commuting to work, much less for all the travel and transportation associated with daily life.  

So it makes sense that we are seeing urban planners across the nation trying to drive city parking out of existence, as, apparently, is happening in Washington, D.C. with the reconstruction of Union Station.  It is not officially Zero Cars or Zero Parking but there is a whiff of that in those circles.

But Tabarrok points out that I have been asymmetric about an issue which is actually symmetrical.  ZERO is one half of the tell of the totalitarian mind.  ALL is the other half of the tell of a totalitarian mind.  When some initiative has to deliver on ALL goals is as bad when a policy is intended to drive some bad outcome to ZERO.  

And it is well described in The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism by Ezra Klein.  

In February, I visited Tahanan, a building that might be the answer to San Francisco’s homelessness crisis. I left wishing that the answer had been other than what it was.

Tahanan, at 833 Bryant Street in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco, is 145 studio units of permanent, supportive housing for the chronically homeless. It’s a cheerful, efficient building that bears the hopes and scars of the population it serves. The carefully curated murals and architectural flourishes give way to extensive water damage inflicted when a resident on an upper floor reportedly slept with the faucets running. Social workers walk purposefully through the halls, greeting residents, and well-loved dogs are being walked everywhere you turn.

But what makes Tahanan notable isn’t its aesthetic. It’s the way it was built. Tahanan went up in three years, for less than $400,000 per unit. Affordable housing projects in the Bay Area routinely take twice as long and cost almost twice as much. “Development timelines for affordable projects in San Francisco have typically stretched to six years or longer, and development costs have reached $600,000 to $700,000 per unit,” observes the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. San Francisco cannot dent its housing crisis at the speed and cost at which it is building affordable units now. But if the pace and price of Tahanan were the norm, the outlook would brighten.

So how did Tahanan do it? The answer, for liberals, is a bit depressing: It got around the government. But the word “government” is misleading here. Government is rarely a singular entity that wants one thing. Different factions and officials and regulations and processes push in different directions. Tahanan succeeded because it had the support of city and state officials who streamlined zoning and cut deals to make it possible. But it needed gobs of private money to avoid triggering an avalanche of well-meaning rules and standards that slow public projects in San Francisco — and nationally.

Basically they had to use "private" philanthropy AND the government had to exempt itself from all its own regulations.  If that is not one law for citizens and one law for the nomenklatura, I do not know what is.  So much for "A nation of laws, not of men."  And it is certainly the mark of the totalitarian authoritarian.  All the goals are equally valuable but the only way to get things done is for the government to exempt itself from all the regulations.

Heh.

The challenge of the everything-bagel approach to governing is that sometimes, it’s exactly the right thing to do. On-shoring the supply chain for renewable energy makes real sense. Making sure jobs in semiconductor factories are good jobs is worthwhile. But there is a cost to accumulation. How many goals and standards are too many? And why is subtraction so rare? It is impossible to read these bills and guidelines and not notice that the additions are rarely matched by deletions. Process is enthusiastically added but seldom lifted.

You know who did insist on retirement of two regulations for every new regulation?  Trump.  I am guessing that Klein wants to reduce regulation but doesn't want to do it the Trump way and doesn't have any other viable way to get out of the totalitarian no-growth box utopian thinking gets you into.

The magical realism in this piece is strong.

I don’t write this as a critic of the Biden administration’s goals. I’m thrilled to see industrial policy revived. I believe semiconductors are to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th. “In the case of CHIPS, this is first and foremost and primarily a national security initiative,” Raimondo told me. “We have national security goals we must achieve. Period. Full stop. No compromise.” Later, she circled back to that point. “Failure is not an option,” she said. But I worry that statements like that deny the obvious. Failure is always an option. The reason industrial policy had to be revived is that it often fails.

I am reading this as "I want central planning without all the failures that necessarily come from central planning."  

His final paragraph gets at a point I often make:

That’s the lesson of “affordable” housing in California. If something as easy to build as a studio apartment complex can become intolerably expensive and slow, then it’s folly to think that far worse can’t befall a fab that ultimately has to compete for customers globally. And if you think failure really is an option — that it’s maybe even the likeliest outcome — then that demands an intensity of focus that liberalism often lacks.

Complex systems involve hard trade-off decision making!  Forget intensity of focus.  If you want multiple incompatible things, then you have to choose among them, even though they might all be desirable outcomes.  

Government in general, and left leaning or socialism or social justicey type government or utopianism forms in particular, just is not up to the task of dealing with limited resources and unlimited wants.  Limited resources in combination with unlimited wants/needs necessarily requires a trade-off decision.  The Classical Liberal answer is obviously Private Property, Due Process, Natural Rights, Rule of Law, Everyone Equal before the Law, and Freedom in combination with Consent of the Governed via various versions of direct or republican democracy.  For Central Planners, the answer is, well, the expert central planners via Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism.

The naming of things is an atavistic human condition.  We name and categorize.  Klein can call it Everything Bagel Liberalism but that is merely Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism wrapped up in cuddlier words.  Everything Bagel Liberalism is just as cruel, just as much a failure, and just as much an affront to Classical Liberalism whether you call it by the cuddly neologism or call it by its proper names of Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism.  It is still an abhorrent failure.

Klein and his ilk need to choose.  Failed outcomes from authoritarianism and totalitarianism or progressive success through Classical Liberalism via Private Property, Due Process, Natural Rights, Rule of Law, Everyone Equal before the Law, Freedom, and Consent of the Governed.  I do not understand their anathema for Classical Liberalism and their continuing love affair with Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism.