A Few of Their Favorite Things
(Which Do Not Include Firefighters, Dams, or Forest Management)
Government policies have trade-offs and government actions are burdened with massive costs and inefficiencies and market distortions. The Left has generally ignored these realities but when we survey the policy-making around the L.A. wildfires we see the flaws in that approach. DEI weakens organizations. Environmental regulations make necessary building and maintenance harder and destroy insurance markets. A promotion of progressive values leads to a diminishment of basic institutional effectiveness. Pretending this is not the case is not viable.
Two days ago, I saw a short video of Gavin Newsom becoming convincingly choked up at the idea that Trump was politicizing the Los Angeles fires (which still rage). It was a decent performance but I (and probably most Americans) rather think that Trump was not politicizing the disaster (in this case) and was rather pointing out valid policy failures on the part of the mayor and governor and the California state legislature that contributed to this catastrophe. The claim that, when disaster strikes, we should all unify has some merit… but the converse is that before disaster strikes we should be very serious about preparing for disasters and attending to fundamentals, rather than focusing on progressive pet causes and weakening our institutions. If that preparation is not made it is not only legitimate to point out the failures-it’s necessary.
Ideology warps your picture of reality. It downgrades certain facts and concerns, distorts the words you hear and the things you read, and gives you a strong affiliative urge toward people who advertise your political values. You become unresponsive to new information and tend to ignore confusing or contradictory data points. Perhaps worst of all, ideology creates a strong and implacable hostility towards those who do not share your belief system. You end up using motivated reasoning to condemn people for words and actions that you might find acceptable (even laudable) were they said or done in the service of your ideology.
A prime symptom of ideology in public policy is the promotion of certain concerns above all else. On the Left, these concerns include: DEI/equity; the beliefs that LGBTQ activists (not people) should have universal acceptance and institutional support; an anti-growth and pro-regulation vision of ecological conservation; and the belief that government funding (alone) can solve social problems like poverty, family dysfunction, crime and ignorance. Look at how the war in Ukraine has morphed into a progressive favored cause, and how that has distorted the Left’s political calculations and policy goals.
The Los Angeles County Fire Department sent a load of their “surplus” gear to Ukraine in 2022, because it felt right to do that. From KTLA in 2022: “Boots, hoses, nozzles, body armor and medication were among the items packed and shipped out.” Don’t need extra of those. You’re welcome, Slava Ukraini!
I would take issue which each of the assumptions above (equity, LGBTQ activism, radical environmentalism, paternalism) but there’s another issue with them: they rely on a bulky and inefficient administrative state for promotion. Special interests and non-profits and even corrupt politicians and contractors end up slowing down government processes and draining vast amounts of wealth from the public purse. Even if I granted that each of these values was valid and important it wouldn’t follow that a state or federal government would be the best way to promote them-but the ideology goes along with a strong support for bureaucracy and a general attitude of reliance on the government for all social reforms. The family and the church are inherently traditionalist, private schools are too diffuse and independent, the market is concerned with profit and efficiency, science is objective and self-critical (or it was)… That leaves government: government agencies and public sector unions and public schools and the vast complex of non-profits which are effectively government appendages. These are the favored vehicles for progressive policy-making.
As the Los Angeles fires have highlighted, government is often an unwieldly and irrational actor. It goes where its peculiar financial and political incentives dictate and it helps its clients and too often ignores important functions, like firefighting and water/forest management.
DEI
I applied to be in the FDNY long ago. At the time the civil service exam was being given roughly every four years. I sat for it and then the Vulcan Society (the fraternal order of black firefighters) and a horde of Leftist non-profits filed suit on the basis that the test results were racially unequal. EVERY test that’s ever been given to a reasonably large cohort has had results that were racially unequal. The FDNY (guided by a federal judge) agreed to throw out the test results and hire based on previous tests (whose results were just as unequal as mine). The only direct result was that none of the candidates in my year or the succeeding few years were eligible for selection. That includes black and Latino candidates as well. Still, those years seem like the glory years of a pre-DEI era compared to what has happened in the proceeding decade and a half. Blue city after blue city has made the forced diversification of their workforces (especially high-status jobs like firefighting) a prominent concern, completely ignoring the question of whether these distortions in hiring and promotion have had any effect on efficacy or morale. I would bet that they have. Just ask the boots on the ground if you doubt it.
Growing firefighter diversity has been the main priority for the L.A. department of late, with a whole special equity bureau. And much has been made of the beautiful rainbow leading the department, run by a lesbian. Should I care that a lesbian saves me lesbianly?
Foremost among the list of concerns for progressives is the redistribution of power, status, and money away from men and white people and the successful and to women and sexual/racial minorities and the unsuccessful. Unfortunately, in a generally meritocratic framework success (promotion, raises, rank) often reflects competence and so DEI will often erode the level of institutional competence. In a sense it must-it is a philosophy of selection and promotion on factors other than merit.
If there was a team of firemen made up of 75% white and 25% Hispanic men, DEI would favor the introduction of more women, black people, queer people, etc. It would favor these things even if these new entrants were weaker and less knowledgeable and less well-trained than the incumbents, as they definitely would be (being by definition more feminine and less experienced as a group).
We should be careful here. It’s always difficult to ascertain how effective an institution is. How much is the competence of the LAFD helping or hindering their current efforts? No one knows. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that DEI is a marginal factor in the L. A. fires. However, I would argue that there’s simply no slack when it comes to firemen or soldiers or police. There’s simply no room for progressive hiring campaigns when it comes to essential protections of life and property. The best and toughest and most teachable (and strongest) candidates should always be chosen for these jobs. As someone who has spent years of his life carrying a rucksack and doing battle drills, I firmly believe this: gender identity and ethnicity is of far, far less importance than whether you’re pulling your weight in that world. Rather than arguing the point progressives usually deny that DEI would ever be a liability (ever?! Surely it must be in some cases) and they usually assume that the institutions in question (fire departments, the military, the CIA) have enough reserve capability that hiring qualifications and promotion standards can be played with, a little, in order to advance other goals. I disagree.
Regulations
Regardless of its stated aims, the state exists to gain power and money from the larger society and will tend to grow in both those area of its own accord unless radically limited. Environmental regulations keep worthy projects like controlled burns or water management projects from being completed. Market distortions destroy insurance policies and encourage risky building. Eventually they badly diminish the economy and bankrupt the state, as they surely will California absent a federal bailout.
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Infrastructure that could have provided more water for those fires has been on hold, tied up in red tape. Ten years ago, California voters approved spending $7.5 billion to build water storage and improve state water facilities—but by 2023 not one dam had been finished, per the Los Angeles Times. Not a single one.
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Water management in California is terrible. Every few years, California receives plenty of rain and snow melt, enough to produce mud slides. But much of this water runs into the sea, because the state will not build the infrastructure needed to collect it. The emergency legislation should give a Federal water management agency exemption from regulations so that it can build the needed infrastructure. This would ensure that fire hydrants would not go dry. But the benefits of sound water management would go far beyond better fire-fighting ability.
Forest management in California is terrible. Experts agree that controlled burns would help to reduce the amount of combustible forest that feeds wildfires. The problem is that it takes years to get the permits to do the controlled burning. The emergency legislation should give a Federal agency the authority to override any regulations and institute better forest management.
The California insurance market has been regulated into oblivion. Forced to provide insurance at ‘historical’ rates (which do not adequately reflect the risk of current disasters or the value of properties) insurers have chosen to pull back. California has established its own state-run insurance concern, but it only has reserves of around $1 billion… and this fire might cause damage which costs 100x that.
The government is not only unwieldly and distractable-it is usually impotent. When it comes to protecting against natural disasters or controlling the market (supply, inflation, insurance) the priorities and plans of the government become irrelevant. During such times the Maintenace of basic functions (which are often unpopular with progressives), like policing and disaster response and budget rectitude and border security, become all-important. The California state government simply doesn’t have the power to influence a market which is the 8th largest on Earth-and if it gained such power that market would shrink drastically and immediately. Government controls destroy vast amounts of wealth. Sometimes it takes a wildfire to reveal exactly how much.
Accountability
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There will be time to criticize an American Mayor in Ghana while her American city burned. Investigations will reveal why there was no water in fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades. Commissions one day will assess whether the smelt fish was more important than thousands of destroyed homes.
The most contemptible aspect of our political class is probably not their misguided progressive values or their illogical and short-sighted policy-making or their disconnection from the concerns of average citizens. It is their unwillingness to admit error and take accountability and correct course. They constantly avoid criticism and deflect blame onto others-subordinates, political opponents, competing interests. Some of that is ideology; more is cowardice and a self-serving approach to their lives. The old playbook of empty speechifying and distraction and deflection was the strategy in the aftermath of the Maui fires in 2023. It will certainly be the strategy here as well-but I suspect it will be less successful.
The
cross-posted an essay today whose author said “Fear morphed into outrage for me as I learned that the fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades did not have water. Allow me to repeat — the worst fire in LA history and the fire hydrants did not have water.” Apparently up to 300 fire hydrants have been stolen from the L. A. municipal area in the past few years.This is a brief and incomplete summary of California policy failures. Whether or not the leaders who have spent their careers distracted by dreams of equity and green utopia pay any political price the people have already suffered. Ultimately a democratic government is only as wise and resilient as its voters. I hope that some Californians have learned the values of fundamental functions of public safety and wilderness management relative to progressive reforms. I hope they are coming to believe that the state is a greedy and destructive force which doesn’t actually care about any of its citizens. It will ruin businesses and communities and markets absent strict controls. The fires did the damage, but California government policies set the stage. Perhaps such policies should be rethought.
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This is an extract from a National Review article that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:
“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.
"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.
But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.
"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.
"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."
Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.
"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”
Trump’s claims about the delta smelt being the cause of water shortages in the Palisades and Eaton fire regions were pure, uncut stupidity. They demonstrate (yet again) that he has no ability to develop an actual understanding of an issue, and he has no substantial knowledge beyond sound bites that resonate with the type of people who watch Fox News.
The facts are these:
There is no shortage of water in the reservoirs of Los Angeles. There is plenty of water flowing from the Sacramento river delta (the smelt’s habitat) to the aqueducts in the central valley that bring water south. Most of this water is used for agriculture anyway, and wouldn’t be of much use in fighting fires more than hundreds of miles away from the San Joaquin valley. Los Angeles is surrounded by very tall mountains, and many neighborhoods are located in the foothills of these mountains. Trump probably can’t intuit this, but water does not flow up hill. It must be pumped into storage tanks, and these are what supply water to the neighborhoods most impacted by these fires. During a fire, power outages are common. Pumps require power. There is limited backup power, so the pumps have not been able to keep up with the intense demand that firefighting puts on the supply of water in these tanks. This has nothing to do with environmental policy, or dam removal, or any of the other brain-dead reasons certain right-wing politicians and media personalities are pointing to.