Obama the Planner

New Republic editor John Judis has a couple of insights about the Obama administration's economic and social goals. He points out that, for more than a century, Progressive and free-market forces have gone through cycles of "reform and reaction."

The Progressives — who my friend John Baden calls the "American counterrevolutionaries" — have repeatedly sought to increase the size and scope of government: railroad regulation, public land agencies, and the income tax in the 1900s; Social Security, low-interest home loans, and government ownership of power plants in the 1930s; Medicare, the war on poverty, and environmental laws in the 1960s.

In between, friends of free markets tried to roll back those reforms, but were never completely successful. Thus, each successive reform era has further increased government power and reduced free markets.

This reminds me of the basic strategy used by the wilderness movement (in which I was active from about 1975 through 1993). Wilderness activists basically considered land that had already been preserved as wilderness or some other classification to be "theirs," while all remaining land was "potentially theirs." Successive congressional land-use bills or presidential decrees would put more land in "their" category, but no matter how much they got, it was never enough.

At the time, I called this the "scorched earth policy," meaning wilderness advocates embedded so many poison pills in the protected lands that no one would ever try to declassify them. This isn't necessarily a deliberate strategy, just an effect of our political system.

Judis goes on to outline the ways in which Obama wants to build on past reforms. First, he wants to use "the budget to shift the locus of industrial production toward 'green' jobs and products." He also wants to "make dramatic changes in transportation with [government's] intervention in the auto industry and in its funding of high-speed rail." Finally, he wants to institute a form of "national planning" in order to "reverse existing trends" towards "suburban housing [and shopping] malls."

People who are attracted to such policies tend to judge them based on their intent rather than their results. In fact, these interventions have nearly all either backfired or had huge unintended consequences.

Railroad regulation was imposed just as trucks appeared on the scene in 1907, leaving railroads helpless against growing competition. "Progressive" income taxes ended up with so many loopholes that they weren't really progressive. The federal loan companies, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, played a key role in the current crisis when they succumbed to political pressure to buy increasingly risky loans.

Social Security is a giant Ponzi scheme that is also one of the most regressive taxes on the books, not to mention that it has provided billions of dollars of surpluses for Congress to borrow with little hope of ever paying it back. Medicare is an even bigger Ponzi scheme, while the war on poverty created a semi-permanent underclass that has been all but forgotten by the liberals who claim to care most about them.

Environmental laws produced many benefits when they focused on technical solutions, but they failed miserably when they attempted to change people's behavior. As transportation expert Alan Pisarski recently told the Institute of Transportation Engineers, technical solutions to air pollution are responsible for 95 to 105 percent of the improvements in air quality in the past 40 years, while behavior solutions produced only minus 5 to 5 percent of the improvements — minus 5 meaning some behavioral solutions made pollution worse.

Unfortunately, Obama's plans are all about changing behavior. This means two things: they will be expensive — especially when counting the unintended consequences — and they won't work. High-speed rail and urban revitalization, for example, are all about redesigning the country for yuppy elites, not ordinary Americans. The question for free-market advocates is: how can we minimize the damage now and roll back the reforms later?