The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future [Hardcover]

Randal O'Toole (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 20, 2007 | ISBN-10: 1933995076 | ISBN-13: 978-1933995076

Drawing on 30 years of experience reviewing hundreds of government plans, Randal O'Toole shows that, thanks to government planners, American cities are choked with congestion, major American housing markets have become unaffordable, and the cost of government infrastructure is spiraling out of control. The book makes the case for repeal of federal planning laws and closure of government planning offices. Every American who worries about the insidious growth of the Nanny State must read this book.

Editorial Reviews

Review

O'Toole documents example after example of government planning gone hideously awry. He demolishes the widely held belief that government planners are somehow smarter or more capable of managing the future than market forces. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many Americans still expect the planners to miraculously get it right the next time around. Better to fire the planners and let free people, free minds and free markets use the genius of their freedom." --The Washington DC Examiner Editorial Board -- The Washington DC Examiner

"A hard-hitting, fact-filled, well-written volume. Fascinatingly, Mr. O'Toole explains why elected officials tend to favor government planning. Namely, they are happy to turn over hot issues to the planning bureaucracy rather than make the decisions -- and take the heat -- themselves." --William H. Peterson, The Washington Times -- The Washington Times

"O'Toole presents an across-the-board indictment of government planning. Whether zoning suburbs, designing rail systems or determining how much timber to cut in national forests, he says, federal, state and local planners are trying to simplify dizzyingly complex problems. Inevitably, they focus on one or two resources, fall prey to planning fads and succumb to pressure from interest groups." --Alan Cooperman, Washington Post Book World -- Washington Post Book World

As O'Toole shows, whether it's failed "smart growth" schemes, oppressive zoning policies, expensive light-rail boondoggles or mismanagement of public forests, government planners have caused us trouble and cost us freedoms. Their misguided, top-down, faddish rules and regulations have brought us higher housing prices, more-crowded roads and forests that are susceptible to diseases and catastrophic fires. O'Toole says it's time to liberate society from planners' control. -- Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 10/28/07, Bill Steigerwald

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Cato Institute (August 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933995076
• ISBN-13: 978-1933995076
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #900,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why government planning fails., November 12, 2007

By 

Donald N. Anderson (Anchorage, Alaska) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future (Hardcover)

In his 48 chapters O'Toole covers a wide range of government planning efforts. Rather than a complaint only about the disastrous consequences of a specific government planning effort, he shows why such efforts are doomed by the very incentives that motivate government.

He has many years of first-hand exposure to the Congressionally mandated planning process for our national forests. He argues that the planning process has wasted over a billion dollars and severely impeded the management of those public lands. It has defocused the Forest Service so badly that they are marginally effective.

He description of the various fads that run through the ranks of urban planners are sufficient to suggest they should be called congestion enhancers. Many urban plans in the guise of "traffic calming" actually make congestion worse in the hope that people will chose a high density lifestyle. Like most urban planning this runs counter to peoples wishes. It just makes commutes more time consuming , increases gas consumption, and increases pollution.

"Smart Growth" is anything but smart and relies on substituting planners pipe dreams for the citizens personal plans and cost sensitive traffic engineering.

He includes a number of examples from Portland, Oregon where urban growth boundaries have run home costs up enough that many people settle in Washington instead. When citizens voted overwhelming against more light rail, Metro chose alternate financing and decided to build anyway. That same Metro opines "Congestion signals positive urban development."

His chapters on "The Rail Transit Hoax" and "The Benefits of the Automobile" are worth the whole cost of the book. There have been so many invalid cost comparisons that one can only assume some promoters of rail and transit are willing to lie to get even close to the cost parameters of personal transportation.

He spends 6 chapters explaining the reasons government planning fails. The result is incredibly higher costs, and often a solution more dangerous to the citizen.

His final 9 chapters suggest replacements for government planning and ways Congress could dramatically improve the management of those public functions that remain in government.

This brief outline just lightly touches on a few of the many topics that O'Toole so ably discusses.

Every legislator should read this book! The information in this book will help every citizen hold their government realistically accountable.

17 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Best-Laid Plans of the Straw Man, June 3, 2009

By 

Kimberly Jongsma "turniptornado" (Michigan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future (Hardcover)

I was not impressed by this book. The first chapter, about forestry planning, was impressive enough, since O'Toole has spent so much of his career in that area. It was enlightening to how tax money can be wasted.

With the next chapter on urban planning, he attacks a straw man. He asserts that all urban planners claim that suburbs cause obesity. Being pretty well-read in contemporary planning, I would say that no planner actually believes that. Everyone knows that many factors go into the high obesity rates in America.

That said, he shouldn't be looking at the contemporary fads of urban planning to attack urban planning, he should be looking at the patterns planners tend to follow, and the history of planning.

Throughout the book, he uses many "if-then" statements that are fallacies. He writes, "If sprawl does not cause obesity, there is no justification for Smart Growth America's call to rebuild the suburbs" (64). He jumps to conclusions like this constantly, ignoring important counter-examples, and it weakens his argument.

This is more like libertarian propaganda than a serious and critical look at planning. It's too bad--he really seems to know a lot.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Insightful look at the myths of planning, February 26, 2011

By 

Mark Elster (Seattle WA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future (Hardcover)

The Best Laid Plans is an insightful look at the misguided profession of planning (urban planning, transportation planning, development planning, and central planning concepts more generally), exposing and debunking the founding principals of planning that began as an outgrowth of the progressive movement and co-opted in each generation by successive planning fads that are all inevitably doomed to failure because the central conceit of urban planning is false -- the utopian notion that we can plan the future (and more to the point, human behavior) if only we are clever enough.

O' Toole does an excellent job of laying out the sordid history of planning, using real world examples of the results of various planning efforts, and makes his case for how we can achieve some of the valid goals of planning (and regulation) more successfully. He does this all from the perspective of one who has been in the trenches working with planners and government agencies to expose the failures of their best-laid plans, a true insider's view on a largely ignored but dangerously influential and powerful pseudo-scientific field that impacts us all.