Anyone recognize the above quote? I'll give the answer at the end of this post.

I'm getting to the end of one of the best non-fiction books I've read in a long time: The Best Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.  The author, Randal O'Toole, is a lightning rod for government planning lovers across the fruited plain.  Some of his staunchest critics include:

Mostly blogs, but indicative of the furor over O'Toole's work.

 I'm almost finished with O'Toole's delightful book.  One thing I didn't know was revealed in a chapter dealing with endangered species and government agencies tasked with preserving them.  O'Toole gives an example:

The Fish and Wildlife Service is charged with protecting and recovering all terrestrial and freshwater endangered species in the United States.  But long before the passage of the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service had the goal of eliminating or controlling wildlife species that were regarded as pests, such as coyotes and prairie dogs.  For decades, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the predecessor agency, the U. S. Biological Survey, killed thousands of prairie dogs each year, usually by poisoning.  To advertise its prowess, the Biological Survey once distriuted a photo showing its name spelled out on the landscape using the bodies of dead prairie dogs.

When the Endangered Species Act was passed, one of the first species listed as endangered was the black-footed ferret, which the Fish and Wildlife Service caled "the rarest mammal in North America." It was endangered because it depended entirely on prairie dogs for both food and -- because it lived in abandoned prairie dog dens -- shelter.  The Fish and Wildlife Service was fully aware of the ferret's dependence on prairie dogs, yet for more than a decade after passage of the Endangered Species Act, the agency continued to poison thousands of prairie dogs each year.  As a result, the ferret nearly went extinct.

The full story of the black-footed ferret debacle is chronicled on the Thoreau Institute blog.

People who know me know that I have zero affection for government planning.  So I'm biased, yes, when it comes to new plans coming from the government at any level.

However, I intend with more entries in this blog to demonstrate that the free market can more often produce better outcomes than government planning does...I'll even go so far as to add "by far" to that assertion.

Now, the answer to the trivia question I posed at the beginning: Ringo Starr in A Hard Day's Night:

Grandfather: Would you look at him? Sittin' there with his hooter scrapin' away at that book!
Ringo: Well, what's the matter with that?
Grandfather: Have you no natural resources of your own? Have they even robbed you of that?
Ringo: You can learn from books!

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