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

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.

"Government planners will want to ban this book. But O'Toole's exorcism of planning should be required reading for elected officials at every level of government." Andy Stahl, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics

"O'Toole has convinced me that — in some cases — markets can work to protect the environment. Conservationists who always support planning and are always disappointed at its outcome should read this book." Andy Kerr, Former Director, Oregon Natural Resources Council

"O'Toole today looks a lot like Jane Jacobs did in 1961. They're both outsiders with a detailed grass-roots view of how planners — with the best of intentions — are following a fashion into disaster." Planning magazine

"Everyone plans. The problem is that people have gotten the idea that government has the ability to plan very large entities, including whole cities and regions. O'Toole documents the problems that occur when this planning fails to work." Peter Gordon, Professor of Urban Planning, University of Southern California

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.

Randal O'Toole is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Described by U.S. News & World Report as a researcher who "has earned a reputation for dogged legwork and sophisticated number crunching," he has served as senior economist at the Thoreau Insitute and as the McCluskey Conservation Fellow at Yale University. His previous books, Reforming the Forest Service and The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths, have significantly influenced public land management and urban planning in this country. An Oregon native, O'Toole currently resides in Bandon, Oregon.