As long as there’s a way to borrow more money, there’s no discipline pushing efficiency.
There seems to be a large number of people with this job description: my job is to say no, with one exception. And what is the exception, the one circumstance where the answer is invariably yes? Borrow more money? Yes, a thousand times yes.
In theory, we’re supposed to invest our surplus capital in new technologies that increase productivity and efficiency, but that’s not what happens in the real world. What actually happens is we squander surplus capital, energy and labor on inefficiency, until we’ve consumed the surplus.
We “grow” via inefficiency, not efficiency. One might imagine that all our new technologies would dramatically reduce the time and cost of straightforward tasks such as obtaining a building permit. But the reality is the exact opposite: where I could obtain a building permit for a modest starter home in one day 40 years ago, now the permit process for that same home, with a few changes to meet new codes, takes 100 days: a 100-fold increase in time, along with a big increase in costs above and beyond inflation.
The entire permit process is now digital. Isn’t all this digital technology amazing? If what took a day 40 years ago now took two hours, I would say yes. But now that the process takes 100 days, well, that sure looks like Anti-Progress.
Public safety is a legitimate concern. Warehouses converted to living quarters with extension cords and iffy wiring can and do burn down, killing people. So having some basic public-safety regulations makes excellent sense.
There is no cost-benefit analysis built into such regulations, and so the power flows to those who say no. There is a point beyond which more regulations and more layers of people saying no are counter-productive to the public interest, but there are no mechanisms to make this calculation or impose any discipline on those with the power to say no.
When everyone is a “stakeholder,” the layers of those who can say no proliferate. Someone can move into town, take an immediate disliking to a proposed housing project, choose among the menu of options to delay or kill the project, and then move away a month later: my work is done, I said no!
Whether saying no was in the broader public interest–who can say, as the adamant no’s will shut down the weak yes’s.
Give the power to say no to a half-dozen agencies, and the inefficiencies of the process expand to near-infinity. Ours is an advocacy system, otherwise known as “pay to play,” and so there’s always some entity that will benefit from any project going forward. But there are also people benefiting from collecting fees and saying no, too. “What’s in the public interest?” morphs into self-interest, and eventually someone with the power to say no does so.
Since we have plenty of money, efficiency is unnecessary. And if we ever run out of money, then the solution is to say yes to borrowing more.
Once an industry becomes a golden goose, fees, friction and inefficiencies proliferate. Soak up some of that free-flowing money, it’s limitless. After all, everyone has to come to NYC or LA, and so we can impose heavy fees and take our time issuing permission, and since the golden goose will have to pay, why bother with efficiency, when inefficiency pays so many salaries?
Until costs become so painful that the golden goose flies away. Then the limitless money dries up, and all those collecting paychecks for saying no rush to “become competitive” by lowering the permit fee from $5,000 to $4,750. That should do it, they’ll all come back for sure.
Well, actually, no, they won’t. Inefficiency is profitable to those soaking up surplus money, but it’s not actually productive, nor does it serve the public interest.
But there’s always one solution when surpluses dry up: borrow more money. And this is how we arrive at this chart of total debt: $102 trillion.
As long as there’s a way to borrow more money, there’s no discipline pushing efficiency. Inefficiencies will rule until the money runs out.
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