It hit me while some telephone installers were wringing their hands over mounting a new satellite dish for me. Clearly, the best spot required getting on the roof. But not only did company work rules prohibit installers from setting foot on a customer’s roof, I realized from the long back and forth that these two young men, barely half my age, were scared to do so. Having been on and off my roof innumerable times without incident, I was stunned. What should have been a simple task had become a surreal hassle.

A tiny example, but symptomatic of the broad disease that’s delaying and raising the costs of or simply preventing projects small and large across North America. It’s as if we’ve taken all the productivity-enhancing wonders afforded by modern technology and dipped the entire apparatus in molasses. Modern engineering enables gigantic, complex bridges to be constructed in months. But the planning and permitting process — routinely dominated by public reviews to mollify opponents — typically requires years. Thus, we end up with the perverse result that today’s projects take many times as long to build as they would have 150 years ago. But try explaining that to a young person like those dish jockeys, and they look at you like you’re the crazy uncle.

“Process obsession” has created a nearly impenetrable regulatory web. I remember writing a speech for the then-Alberta energy minister, calling for new electricity transmission lines to ensure the seamless flow of power from producing to consuming areas. That was more than eight years ago. Today, Alberta’s north-south power backbone remains unchanged from the 1980s.

The Trans-Canada Highway through much of British Columbia remains a 1960s abomination, built to 1950s standards. This artery is being upgraded at the rate of five kilometres per year. If Canada’s transcontinental railway had gone like that, the CPR’s website would today be proclaiming the laying of the last piece of track linking Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie. Yet, the builder of one of those tiny Trans-Canada Highway upgrades has crowed about how it finished early.

The situation appears even worse in the U.S. The Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center will take eight times as long to build during times of plenty as the Empire State Building took during the Great Depression. President Barack Obama recently commented on this at a political fundraiser in California: “We’ve lost our ambition, our imagination and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam and unleashed all the potential in this country.”

Yet, Obama is the biggest preventer of worthy economic activity in U.S. history. His needless moratorium on Gulf Coast drilling and his deferral of the Keystone pipeline are just two examples.

The way we go about things today represents gigantic volumes of lost productivity. The added costs of things that do get done are borne by the taxpayer and consumer, while the lost benefits of those that don’t impoverish everyone. IE

 

More of Koch’s articles can be read at
www.drjandmrk.com.