Much of our recent history has been an ever-expanding story of inventing and legislating various societal utopias whose funding and realization are consumed by the process with little produced or accomplished. Two examples come to mind, one from the distant past and another very current.
Decades ago, while at an international medical meeting, I met an Irish physician who was desperately seeking a replacement for his “indentured” tour of duty in Saudi Arabia. The pay was several times what he earned at home, and vacation time and travel support were excellent. Although one might presume from his background that the non-availability of alcohol and minimal options for female companionship were factors, they were not. His overriding concern, of which the sharing diminished his chances of getting a replacement for the remainder of his two-year term, was the lack of infrastructure supporting the world class hospital he worked at. The Saudis, flush with petrodollars, had built a brand-new medical center to serve a large portion of their population distant from their existing urban centers. My Irish acquaintance breathlessly detailed all the most up to date facilities and medical devices available there, many of which were not yet available to me in my suburban hospitals thanks to Certificate of Need restrictions (one of Medicare’s early and ultimately failed attempts at cost control). The medical staff had representatives in all specialties, the cream of that country’s indigenous graduates as well as many excellent and published international physicians. Paraprofessional staff support was excellent; attracting Saudis to work in a modern, air-conditioned, well supplied environment for excellent pay was not an issue. Due to no financial constraints and monarchically instantaneous approval of the project, the hospital had been built, equipped, and approved by international certification bodies in record time. What was lacking and seemed to be lost in the government’s dreams for its reputation and people, were utilities. Water was minimal, electricity intermittent. Every action by the medical staff had to first account for the availability of energy and water. Given the spectacularity and instantaneous birth of the project, and the pride with which the government advertised its progress and modernity to its own populace and the world, complaints regarding the actual usability of the medical center were noticed and disfavored. Frowns from the authorities carried, my Irish physician friend felt, certain risks of adverse action. And so, out of inability to practice his profession at his capabilities, and his fears and frustrations at trying to improve the situation, arose his desperation to get out. While at my young age the idea of a Middle East medical adventure, especially for the pay and benefits he outlined, was attractive, the absence of infrastructure for the adventure and the medical center rapidly dissuaded me. And any others he may have spoken with, I must assume. I never learned if the infrastructure ever caught up with the unrealized dream.
Another more immediate example of pie in the sky without a pie pan is California’s high-speed rail to and from nowhere. This was to be Governor Jerry Brown’s Pyramid, a public works project exceeding those of his father, Governor Edmund Brown. Far more visible and attractive than Governor Moonbeam’s attempts to divert the Sacramento River Delta water via new tunnels to feed Southern California’s unquenchable thirst. It fit right in with the earliest sprouts of the Green New Deal for diverting much gasoline traffic from the state’s aorta, Interstate 5. Economic benefits would be many when San Francisco and Los Angeles were only 2-3 hours apart without the need for more crowding of the airspace. Several stops along the Central Valley might reinvigorate the economy of that arid area as water gradually disappeared and agriculture became ecologically untenable. Driven by electricity, whose source hopefully would be solar and wind rather than the initial gas and diesel power plants, the new system would be the crown jewel of a rapidly developing public transportation system replacing non-electric vehicles in the Golden State. Prior efforts by private industry, mainly oil companies and Goodyear Tire and Rubber, had eliminated a very good public transportation system in the Los Angeles area by bus and light rail in favor of the newly popular automobiles in the mid-1900s, and government cooperated with massive local and regional umbilicals of concrete roadway. Now it was time to provide for the public’s private good via the government’s ideas of what that should be. Ater all, China and Japan had done so successfully (and China had used mainly U.S. technology to build their systems)! Given that economically California was, in effect, its own nation-state and a driver of climate recovery in the United States as a whole, pushing through this project was practically a duty. And so, Californians bought the intent with a substantial part of their economic future. Only $30 billion plus in bonds were felt to be needed to plan, permit, buy rights of way, and build out the bullet train in perhaps a total of ten years. That cost, and time to completion, is now well over the horizon in an unknown territory. Despite the full support of a supermajority legislature and Governor Newsom (who envisions himself an international figure of stature before even running for President), the project has languished in the bureaucratic outback conceived by those two parents. Multiple agencies, both state and federal, feel the need to expand their authority and consume not their pounds of flesh but their due reams of paper. They’ve chewed through over $100 billion now, like rats in cheese, and more cheese is demanded every election cycle. Not all the rights of way have been obtained. Centers of towns such as Fresno have been demolished to make way for stations and the concrete roadbed needed. The measures needed to protect the roadbed from frequent earthquakes, and ongoing subsidence of the ground due to withdrawal of water for crops, are not yet clear. Actual access to the San Francisco area and to central Los Angeles via unbuilt tunnels has been put on the back burner, seemingly forgotten in enthusiasm to get the train built and running only in the Central Valley, from Bakersfield to Merced. Without any evidence that people in those areas want to whiz along for thirty to sixty minutes between their cities just for the experience. No plan has been publicized for how potential passengers will get from Union Station in Los Angeles, or anywhere in the greater LA area, to Bakersfield other than by—you guessed it—automobile. And the same for access to the northern extent of the train’s route from the Bay area. But since multiple contractors, consultants, and councils are now involved, and some concrete roadbed has been placed here and there, pounds must inevitably follow the pennies already spent with any true opening date clouded in bureaucratic mystery. The source(s) of the electricity needed to run this massive undertaking have not been identified other than an intent to use solar and wind. Besides massive new installations, whose cost and siting are indecipherable, public consideration of the large numbers and sitings of batteries to run the system at night or under adverse weather conditions has likewise not occurred. Finally, strong estimates indicate that the clean energy infrastructure for the anticipated and legislated replacement of all automobiles, trucks, and trains by electric vehicles will not be invented or built in time for those realities to be born. There may not be enough gold in the world, much less the U.S. or California, to build this yellow brick road. Yet meanwhile private industry is quickly answering a well-defined market need, a private high-speed rail between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Brightline Railroads, already successful in Florida, has obtained the right of way in the median of Interstate 15 and may well succeed in buildout and first travel in four to five years. If successful they will satisfy a public demand, not a governmentally perceived public need.
And so, these modest examples of building Oz without access or supporting infrastructure bring us to their synonyms, social services. In California we furthered the universality of personal rights over public interest when we abolished our system of state hospitals for the seriously mentally ill. Yes, many forced there may not have belonged, but most did need, at least for a time, custodial care at public expense. But the 1960’s were a period when we finally gained a heart, and the courage to turn all these folks loose to the individual freedom they had as an inalienable right regardless of their personal capacity to responsibly exercise it. Somehow, as is so often the case with our best intentions in governmental social support of our fellows, we did not use our brains in equipotent measure to our hearts and courage. No one had thought to design community-based systems adequate to monitor, support, and treat these individuals in their newly returned independence. Nor did any private or governmental body seriously evaluate the costs, and sources of paying those costs, to establish and maintain such systems. Many of these returned to families as new burdens draining them of assets. Many began cycling through various chemical dependencies to try to deal with their atypical mentation. Many began a new custodial regimen within our criminal justice systems. They became a kind of iceberg, whose main mass lay hidden just below our social surface. Then we decided that those who had entered the new custodiality of criminal incarceration, along with many whose mental status was not impaired but perhaps only anti-social, deserved to have their inalienable rights restored also. Laws were changed and prisons disgorged of many thousands who had not, even if appropriately placed in custody, been provided adequate infrastructure (housing and healthcare) for their keeping. Many of those who were justifiably in state prisons were remanded to county and city incarceration, without timely planning, funding, or expansion of more local facilities and services. Many at the state and local levels were returned to full freedom and independence, without any meaningful provisions for their transition from complete dependence to personal authority and responsibility. Add massive new regulatory infrastructure that obstructs private production of goods, services, and housing, and we transfer those truly in need of custodiality or guardianship and training in life to the streets. Reduce enforcement of “quality of life” crimes and reap the resultant erosion of civility without governmental means of enforcing same. With only short-term social programs and actions invented on the fly to support suddenly fashionable needs and unsupported by the slowly and carefully designed infrastructure of funding sources and readily available physical and personnel resources, the flying monkeys gradually took over.
Our elected and administrative wizards hide behind the curtain of “general welfare”, a gross misinterpretation of their Constitutional duties. They continue to conjure facilities, industries, programs, and services out of whole paper currency to delight and distract a populace whom they consider midgets and dwarfs. Any substantive question of these grandiose plans and expenditures without foundational structure funded by confiscation of present and future private wealth is deflected with the thoughtful intellectual misdirection, “that’s a horse of a different color”. The Yellow Brick Road, unbuilt due to the distraction of the intended wonders of Oz, will not allow those who have chosen to be completely dependent on the Wizard to leave, nor allow outsiders to arrive and expose the well-meaning but forgetful old man behind the curtain, or his acolytes. Sometime soon it will be time to click our silver heels three times and remember that “there is no place like (our Constitutional) home”.