The Cost of Compliance

Abundance Note #1

I’m reading Ezra Klein’s new book Abundance. One of the reasons is that my new friend Ben reminds me that it has been a long time since I’ve been reading a healthy amount of contemporary non-fiction. The book is logical but its language doesn’t flow well, but it does show me a number of ideas and priorities I haven’t heard from anywhere else.

Sue Me
What I have gotten so far is a phenomenal confirmation and deeper insight into what I learned at the FBI Citizens Academy with regard to what it now takes, as opposed to at its inception, to secure a federal administrative warrant. Since Klein takes the L for his ideological bros, I’ll pile on. You see during the past 40 years we have piled on a jungle’s worth of legal boa constrictors onto all government action. The charters of federal agencies are relatively straightforward. Of course we should have an Environmental Protection Agency, but the way that agency and every other federal agency operates are with a thousand checks on process, and no balance. In other words, whatever the government attempts to do, there are thousands of ways and means to sue them if you suspect they may screw up. It’s a kind of administrative prior restraint. Considering the lack of trust that the American public has in government, it keeps a lot of lawyers busy. But what do we have to show for it? I think the appropriate word is Bupkis, which is more than nothing but enough for you to know that it stinks.

His example of high speed rail in California or anywhere is apt. Several weeks ago I met an anesthesiologist who had a bunch of side hustles. One of them was to run a core sample drilling company. So basically he makes money every time there is a permitting process for new commercial construction in California. The thing to understand is that all you have to do is buy a handful of protestors and initiate the very low bar for an environmental impact review. You can stop anything from happening.

See this spot over at 33°50'43.0"N 118°16'43.9"W? It’s a big vacant lot a couple miles from my house that has been empty a very long time. It’s definitely bigger than Exposition Park where the we have both a football and a futbol stadium. It was once the site in consideration for what is now SoFi Stadium. You can see it’s clearly bigger than Dignity Health Sports Center just north, which is the current home of the LA Galaxy. Now the plan is for an outlet mall. Here’s the 56MB environmental impact report. Three volumes 2,012 pages. This is the DRAFT report, dated January 2006. I think you can get the point.

Do nothing here for 20 years.

“The environmentalist movement evolved to stop bad people from destroying the world, and so we have perfected the art of saying no,” says Larry Selzer, the president and CEO of the Conservation Fund. “But we can’t ‘no’ our way to the kind of growth we need. The Interstate Highway System is forty-nine thousand miles of road. The interstate clean-energy system—the solar farms, the wind turbines, the geothermal land, the transmission lines, the pipes—will touch more than five hundred thousand miles of land. This will be an enormous project. We have to build, and build, and build.”

Of course Klein is smart to dig at Progressives because it’s trivially easy for them to deflect all criticism of government regulation towards what they believe is the evil core of conservative thought. But to his detriment, he didn’t give much thought at all to nuclear power even though he bragged about the efficiency of French construction. The bottom line is that we are running our populist politics like audition employment, which I hate.

Have you ever applied for a job and found that you had 4 separate interviews, including one in which those two levels junior to you had a vote? Yeah, that kind of democracy gets no work done, which is the point. Do I need to mention how much China has built in the years since the Carson environmental impact draft was submitted 19 years ago?

Zachary D. Liscow
I forgot that I have SSRN membership. I’ll use it more now that I’m moving towards more non-fiction. Liscow is the scholar who helps us understand the nature and cost of compliance when it comes to building infrastructure in the US. His work informs Klein. The need for DOGE purges continues

To wit:

In separate work with Leah Brooks, Liscow has found the cost of building a mile of interstate highway tripled in the back half of the twentieth century. “Though the data are fairly sparse, available data show that the U.S. Interstates built in the 1980s and 1990s were more expensive (in real terms) than any projects built elsewhere at any time—and that the highways built since 2010 are far more expensive than highway projects elsewhere in the world,” he writes.

The Military Model
Klein eventually got to an idea I began to consider as soon as the above became evident, which is in a way a rude opinion I have been considering ever since Katrina. You may remember stories about Lt. General Russell Honore aka ‘that John Wayne dude’ who rolled into town and took command and rapidly began delivering goods and services in a rapid coordinated way.

That John Wayne dude.

There are few people who doubt a world class capacity in the US Armed Forces. It’s a complicated beast with many flaws. But there is at its heart an understanding that a large number of matters are life and death and failure is not an option. Moreover, the military has the kind of permanent establishment only a government can provide. All of the supplies that Walmart and Home Depot were able to deliver off the cuff is part the kind of logistical contingency planning practiced every day by soldiers like Honore.

Still, I think the most important capacity of the military is its ability to act and be judged solely on victory or defeat. Once the resources are deployed, the action begins without delay. This is what the rest of our government agencies lack, the clarity of purpose to build or to assist or to repair and stay on mission. It’s all about outcomes. This is the essence of responsive government, and it is precisely what we lack.

I have, in my own life, since youth sought what Yukio Mishima called ‘the unity of pen and sword’. We have met the enemy and it is us, in our willingness to endlessly deliberate and seek out the voice of ‘no’ in its every diverse manifestation. We have relegated victory into oblivion.

We must do better.