The late, great conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke said of socialism, "To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze."
P.J. hated socialism because no one was in charge of anything. The "government" rarely "governed" anything except that which could be manipulated into benefitting the governing elite. The rest was farmed out to the "non-profit/industrial complex," which doesn't care about maintaining what it's managing because there's no incentive to do so.
Think about Zohran Mamnani's "government-run grocery stores." Chicago "studied" the matter, paying a non-profit group that paid a for-profit consultant company, which determined it wouldn't work.
The only "city-run" grocery store in the country is in Kansas City. The problem is that it's not run by the city. It's run by a for-profit subsidiary that needs gobs of cash from the city to stay open.
Writing in Persuasion, Jacob Savage relates a trip he took to Salt Lake City, where he took his kids to Wheeler Farm in Murray, Utah. The 75-acre farm was originally homesteaded in the late 1800s and turned over to Salt Lake County in the 1970s.
It was jarring, in the best way, to see a public space so well-run. Admission is free. Kids walk right up to cows, goats, sheep, and chickens. They climb on old tractors, go on wagon rides, race through open fields.
After a busy morning, we bought $2 Uncrustables and $1.50 popsicles from the gift shop and sat for lunch. At one point, my 3-year-old wandered over to a chicken coop that had been converted into a playhouse. He was inside when a mom rushed over—her son was bleeding. He’d been nicked by a loose plank that had come down in the coop.
The mostly college-aged staff ushered the kids out and surveyed the damage. Coming from Los Angeles, I expected some level of generalized freaking out: yellow tape, an incident report, something. Instead, what happened was even stranger: one of the employees wandered out to find a nail gun and returned to fix the problem plank on the spot.
A week later, Savage took his kids to the city-owned Los Angeles Zoo. The contrast was beyond shocking.
Admission for the family of four was $98. "Exhibits that are supposed to be open are inexplicably closed. Every fifty feet there’s another kiosk that’s boarded up, another sign for something that’s been “coming soon” for years," writes Savage.
The petting goats have been off-limits since COVID. “Our flock of goats and sheep have interacted with more than 2 million guests in their twelve years at Muriel’s Ranch,” a long-winded sign informs you, in both English and Spanish. “To ensure their comfort as they enter their golden years, we have made the decision to change the experience at the Ranch to viewing only” (translation: “we no longer feel like it”).
A few confused tourists wandered outside the elephant enclosure, wondering where the animals had gone (back in May, following protests by a small but determined group of activists, Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council deported the elephants to Tulsa). It would have taken a single employee less than an hour to update the signage, but why bother when no one’s in charge?
And there’s no one in charge.
The zoo was managed by a non-profit group which has subcontracted concessions to the for-profit SSA Group. The non-profit gets a "management fee" (i.e., "kickback") for overseeing the contract, and SSA is allowed to charge $16 for a burger.
"After spending $75 on a couple of hot dogs and hamburgers, I was pretty sure someone was benefiting from the Los Angeles Zoo. It’s just not the zoo, or the animals, or the citizens of Los Angeles," writes Savage.
Partly it’s the unions, it’s the Groups, it’s our degraded political culture, in some cases the sheer size of these states or metros—all the standard Abundance stuff. But I’d push back against Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The belief that good governance can be engineered—that there’s a correct way to govern, some set of magical processes that, if followed, will achieve optimal results—is what led cities to outsource core functions to consultants and nonprofits in the first place. And replacing one bloated public-private technocracy with a slightly more efficient public-private technocracy doesn’t solve this fundamental problem.
The red tape isn’t the cause; it’s the excuse.
Indeed, blue cities create a culture in which public employees are not directly responsible for "solving problems" or managing entities. That's not in their job description.
"And until Blue State governance takes joy in providing things for its citizens—until every opportunity to demonstrate competence isn’t understood primarily as something to be triaged, or outsourced—regulatory reform will be just another band-aid," writes Savage.
Simple things like self-reliance, personal responsibility, and competence-based hiring will have to return to blue cities for meaningful reform to happen.
I'm not optimistic.
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