BETTER TO BET ON EMERGENCE.

A recent Reason investigation of "certificate of need" restrictions on the expansion of medical facilities correctly argues "We can't have nice things."

Joshua Windham, the Institute for Justice attorney who is litigating [cataract surgeon Jay] Singleton's case, says the problem lies with North Carolina's Certificate of Need (CON) law, which gives government regulators—rather than patients or consumers—the power to decide what services are needed.

"The government can't possibly know these things in advance, in part because people's perceptions of their own needs will change, but also because the facts of reality will change."

Well, no.

[A]t least on a chalkboard we can achieve Platonic perfection in the issuance of permits, which is to say, trade tested betterments would do no better.  Reality generally falls short of Platonic perfection, let alone of Pareto optimality.  There are certificate of need regulations in place in Illinois, and those might have had the cosmetic effect of bending the cost curve down by limiting the construction of intensive care units, particularly downstate, but with the consequence of severe capacity constraints during the coronavirus outbreaks.

Perhaps there's a more general lesson, suggested by George Will.

For [advocates of environmental-social corporate governance] progress consists of returning to the Middle Ages.

Then, life for most people was (as Thomas Hobbes depicted life in the state of nature) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Hitherto in human history, there was stagnation — negligible economic growth — because workers, and the very few who had a surplus beyond subsistence to save, were surrounded by grasping “stakeholders”: kings, nobles, communities, tribes, guilds, churches and others who enforced nonconsensual communal sharing, leeching away much of what little that workers received for their dawn-to-dusk toils.

Mass flourishing has been enabled by economic growth. It began with the Enlightenment principle that individuals own what their labor and investments produce.

ESG is the stealthy socialization of wealth, the surreptitious semi-confiscation of others’ wealth. But progressives’ ESG aspiration is worse than a strange nostalgia for the 1300s. It also is a repellent yearning for the 1930s.

Show any skill in producing nice things, somebody with no ability to do so will find a way to batten off it.