Eight years ago, American film producer Barry Josephson moved into a hilltop home in Pacific Palisades, the affluent Los Angeles neighborhood nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains.<\/p>\n
Josephson, whose film credits include Enchanted <\/em>(2007) and Aliens in the Attic <\/em>(2009), loved his home. But one issue was a source of chronic unease: the extremely combustible vegetation that choked the nearby public lands.<\/p>\n \u201cWe all take a risk living here,\u201d Josephson recently told<\/a> the Wall Street Journal<\/em>; \u201cThat land should be maintained.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem was the government was not <\/em>maintaining the land. So according to Josephson, several residents in the area decided to risk $150 fines (the penalty for removing brush from state parklands without a license) and removed the\u00a0 highly flammable brush on their own.<\/p>\n In the wake of the Los Angeles fires, which have claimed more than two dozen lives and already destroyed 10,000-plus structures, debates rage over the cause of the blazes. While many argue that the wildfires stem from climate change, an abundance of evidence suggests a simpler explanation: bureaucratic dysfunction.\u00a0<\/p>\n More than four and a half years ago, the New York Times<\/em> reported that government agencies in western states were struggling to properly maintain public lands, which was creating a wildfire crisis.\u00a0<\/p>\n A big part of the problem was fire aggressive suppression, which was causing dry vegetation to build up in heavily forested areas. But another problem was that government forest services weren\u2019t thinning out forested areas fast enough. When these deforestation efforts did happen, they were often poorly targeted<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Five years later, reporting from the Journal <\/em>shows a similar pattern. The newspaper, which reviewed public records and interviewed officials, identified \u201ca slow-moving tangle of government agencies that own or regulate Los Angeles\u2019s undeveloped land.\u201d<\/p>\n The inefficiency of bureaucracy is something so well known we take for granted. It\u2019s been widely discussed in not just economics, but pop culture.\u00a0<\/p>\n In The Empire Strikes Back, <\/em>when Han Solo realizes he and his companions are inside a giant alien creature, he orders Chewy to fire up the Millennium Falcon and \u201cget us out of here.\u201d Princes Leia objects, correctly pointing out that Empire goons are still out there looking for them.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no time to discuss this as a committee!\u201d Han retorts<\/a>.<\/p>\n The lesson is simple. When something must <\/em>get done, the last thing you want to do is have to take it to a committee. Because bureaucracy is to action what kryptonite is to Superman.\u00a0<\/p>\n For generations, economists have<\/a> highlighted the inherent problems<\/a> of bureaucracy. But none have done so with more effect than Ludwig von Mises, who wrote an entire tome about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe bureaucrat is not free to aim at improvement,\u201d Mises wrote in Bureaucracy<\/em>. \u201cHe is bound to obey rules and regulations established by a superior body. He has no right to embark upon innovations if his superiors do not approve of them. His duty and his virtue is to be obedient.\u201d<\/p>\n Bureaucracies tend to struggle for various reasons \u2014 a lack of knowledge, bad incentives, irrational economic calculation, over-centralization \u2014 but the situation in Los Angeles was even more complicated. The lands were not being managed by one unwieldy bureaucracy but by many.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn the Palisades,\u201d the Journal <\/em>reports, \u201cthe city and county of Los Angeles, the state parks department, the California Coastal Commission, and the National Park Service all have a say in what happens on land surrounding residential areas.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to imagine a better formula for inaction and dysfunction, which was so bad that the LA Fire Department, according to the Journal<\/em>, was writing \u201ccitations to the state parks department for not clearing vegetation from its property.\u201d<\/p>\n Did you catch that? One public department was writing fines to another public department. Yet nothing was happening, something that even public officials simply couldn\u2019t understand.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHow can the state of California spend so much time and money on fire mitigation, but you don\u2019t do the most basic thing, which is to clear brush on your land that\u2019s near homes?\u201d Maryam Zar, former president of the Palisades Community Council, asked.<\/p>\n What Ms. Zar doesn\u2019t understand is that a lack of funding wasn\u2019t the problem. The system of management was the problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n In economics, there\u2019s a concept known as the Tragedy of the Commons<\/a>, which explains how property that is not privately owned and is instead collectively managed tends to be poorly maintained since no single individual has a direct incentive to care for it.<\/p>\n This is a particular problem in California, where about 52 percent of the land is publicly owned<\/a>. But things were made worse in Palisades, where the lands surrounding residential properties were subject to not one bureaucracy but five <\/em>of them.<\/p>\n The result is predictable. Nobody is taking responsibility for these \u2018public\u2019 lands.\u00a0<\/p>\n All of this explains why Barry Josephson\u2019s neighbors had to take it upon themselves to clear out highly flammable brush. By removing the dry, dense vegetation the parks department could not get around to clearing, Josephson\u2019s neighbors risked getting fined \u2014 but they may have saved their homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Journal <\/em>reports that most of the homes in the neighborhood are still standing even though investigators believe one of the fires started \u201cjust a few hundred feet away.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a Kafkaesque twist to the story that shows bureaucracy is often not just absurd, but deadly.<\/p>\n The post How Bureaucracy Fueled the Los Angeles Wildfires<\/a> was first published by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER)<\/a>, and is republished here with permission. Please support their efforts.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eight years ago, American film producer Barry Josephson moved into a hilltop home in Pacific Palisades, the affluent Los Angeles neighborhood nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. Josephson, whose film credits include Enchanted (2007) and Aliens in the Attic (2009), loved his home. But one issue was a source of chronic …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":2324418,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2366260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2366260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2366260"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2366260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2366261,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2366260\/revisions\/2366261"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2324418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2366260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2366260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2366260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}