The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future,Randal O'Toole

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The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future (Book/ Hardcover)

by Randal O'Toole

Product Overview

Some people think they know all the answers. They know how far you should live from your job. They know how big your backyard should be. They know how cities and forests should grow.

Government planners claim to know all of that and more. They say that if you want to live in pleasant communities, enjoy beautiful wilderness, and get to work on time, you should put them in charge. But 30 years of research has convinced Randal O’Toole—one of Newsweek's top 20 “movers and shakers in the West”—that they’re wrong. In The Best-Laid Plans, he shows in case after case that government planning frequently causes the very problems it is intended to solve.

Although national economic planning has been widely discredited in theory and practice, government planners still control much of our infrastructure and land. O’Toole examines how the schemes of the planners go horribly wrong. Planners, obsessed with “smart growth,” think they can make our towns better places to live, but their plans result in unaffordable housing, more congestion, and increased crime. An Oregon native, O’Toole specifically examines how smart growth failed in Portland. He shows how the U.S. Forest Service tries to plan millions of acres of national forests but ends up making them more susceptible to catastrophes than ever.

Combining theory with case studies to underscore his analysis, O’Toole calls for repealing federal, state, and local planning laws and proposes reforms that can help solve social and environmental problems without heavy-handed government regulation.

The Best-Laid Plans is a powerful challenge to the conventional wisdom about public lands, urban growth, and government planning.

About the Author(s)

Randal O'Toole

Randal O'Toole is a Cato Institute Senior Fellow working on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues. O'Toole's research on national forest management, culminating in his 1988 book, Reforming the Forest Service, has had a major influence on Forest Service policy and on-the-ground management. His analysis of urban land-use and transportation issues, brought together in his 2001 book, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths, has influenced decisions in cities across the country. In his book The Best-Laid Plans, O'Toole calls for repealing federal, state, and local planning laws and proposes reforms that can help solve social and environmental problems without heavy-handed government regulation. O'Toole's latest book is Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It, in which he presents a wide range of innovative ideas and policy recommendations for creating an effective transportation system. O'Toole is the author of numerous Cato papers. He has also written for Regulation magazine as well as op-eds and articles for numerous other national journals and newspapers. O'Toole travels extensively and has spoken about free-market environmental issues in dozens of cities. An Oregon native, O'Toole was educated in forestry at Oregon State University and in economics at the University of Oregon.

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Product Details

Category: Business & Economics

Format: Book (Hardcover)

Publisher: Cato Institute

Date Published: Sep 25, 2007

Language: English

ISBN: 9781933995076

SKU: LT-916

Dimensions: 6.50 x 9.25 x 1.50 (in)

Weight: 27.90 oz



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