We don’t need a national strategy on everything

Officials at the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma say America needs a national freight-mobility strategy. Farmers await a new farm bill to see what this countrys agricultural policy is. Manufacturers want a national manufacturing strategy, and a national energy policy too. Everyone with an interest in schoolsthat is, everyone has a view on whether there ought to be a national education policy and, if so, what it ought to say. Those concerned about threats to our communications and information networks want a national cybersecurity strategy. Contentious battles in the Other Washington rage over national economic and fi scal policy.

Quite clearly, we need a national strategy on policies.

Or maybe its a national policy on strategies thats called for.

Maybe what we need is a plan. Plans are good. Planning can be a valuable exercise in setting goals and fi guring out whats needed to accomplish them. Plans help set priorities and allocate scarce resources. Plans span the spectrum from the trivial to the crucial, from routine and simple events such as the weekly excursion to the grocery store to complex and diverse matters like national defense.

Everything can be planned. But should it be?

Perhaps not, at least not by government, the entity on which so many demands are placed these days for a grand strategy.

For all the attributes of plans and plan making, government planning, in this country anyway, meets with considerable skepticism if not outright resistance. The very mention of central planning conjures up associations with some of historys more odious exercises in goal setting and list making, notably the Soviets dreary parade of five-year plans and Chinas disastrous Great Leap Forward. Bad enough to have bad people making bad plans; its much worse when bad people are empowered with the bad means to impose bad plans. Better to do away with any risk or temptation to head in that direction.

But even in its more innocuous forms, centralized governmental planning has considerable shortcomings.

A vendor at a Seattle antiquarian-book fair a few years back provided this rough translation of the medieval Latin on the illuminated page of a prayer book: Gimme, gimme, gimmeand smite mine enemies. Change enemies to competitors (or leave it as is; it works that way, too) and youve got an accurate summation of the motivation behind the call for many of those national policies and strategies.

A plan written, implemented and backed by the federal government is a great way to assure that that most valuable of national resourcesmoneyis reserved for ones own industry or, even better, for ones own particular niche or interest and to keep it out of the grubby fists of ones competitorswhere itll just be wasted. Debates over transportation and freight-mobility policies are also discussions about allocation of dollars among highway, rail, waterway and air-transport modes and their constituents, and who gets more subsidies. Sorry, critical investments in important national assets.

Most challenging of all, planning the future is hard. A national energy plan written less than a decade ago, for example, might be well reasoned, meticulously detailed and amply supported in its conclusions. It would also prove to be remarkably wrong and useless, unless it happened to have bucked conventional wisdom of the time and predicted the remarkable boom in domestically produced oil and natural gas and its remarkable remake of American business.

Not surprisingly, the most successful business sector today (and one of huge importance to this part of the country) is one for which theres been the least centralized planning: high tech.

Just as well: A government-written plan could never hope to keep up with the pace of innovation and change in the sector.

Perhaps other sectors, and the American public, might actually benefi t from less governmental planning, or at least from planning that sets the stage for desired outcomes without determining precisely who and in what form theyll come from.

Otherwise, the most pertinent question to be asked about policies and strategies will continue to be not whats in it? but whats in it for me?

BILL VIRGIN is founder and owner of Northwest Newsletter Group, which publishes Washington Manufacturing Alert and Pacific Northwest Rail News.