A perceptive reader wrote to me:
“The best example of the difference you define between an industrial state and a liberally indolent state is not so much electromobility, but the concept of the ‘15-minute city.’
On paper, it’s a great idea – let’s go back to planning cities so that neighborhoods have secured infrastructure and workplaces are within a reasonable distance from homes, essentially the model used by both Baťa and socialist ministers of industry. (And one that traditionally worked in the U.S. as well. Before the urbanist planners took over, American cities were more or less an even mix of workshops, schools, apartment buildings, shops, factories… – note by PH.) But what do the attempts to implement this idea look like? Massive construction or a requirement for developers to include a store, daycare, or cinema in new districts? Not at all. The liberally indolent state simply starts charging for commuting to work or for shopping, eliminates free parking for non-residents, and piously waits for the 15-minute city to somehow emerge on its own…”
Behind this failure lies a fundamentally flawed belief that the state must not (or cannot) build, construct, found, and so on. In West Germany in 1975, no one would have thought that the state might be a worse builder or operator of factories, department stores, or schools than private capital. Among other reasons, because everyone had experience with functioning state enterprises and employee councils in private companies, and everyone knew that it worked reasonably well. Only now, after two generations who have never seen an active state, can we be so easily fooled into believing that the state is incapable of being economically active.
And when the state is no longer able to build and operate, it is left only with taxing and regulating.
But that mistaken belief is only the beginning. In the second phase, an entire sector or social class forms, one that profits from the state’s unwillingness to build public infrastructure. Reasonable people then realize that it’s not enough to merely correct or refute the error. You must also defeat the group that benefits from it. And that group forms alliances with other social strata…