The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future - Hardcover

O'Toole documents example after example of government planning gone hideously awry. He demolishes the widely held belief that government planners are somehow smarter or more capable of managing the future than market forces. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many Americans still expect the planners to miraculously get it right the next time around. Better to fire the planners and let free people, free minds and free markets use the genius of their freedom." --The Washington DC Examiner Editorial Board -- The Washington DC Examiner

"A hard-hitting, fact-filled, well-written volume. Fascinatingly, Mr. O'Toole explains why elected officials tend to favor government planning. Namely, they are happy to turn over hot issues to the planning bureaucracy rather than make the decisions -- and take the heat -- themselves." --William H. Peterson, The Washington Times -- The Washington Times

"O'Toole presents an across-the-board indictment of government planning. Whether zoning suburbs, designing rail systems or determining how much timber to cut in national forests, he says, federal, state and local planners are trying to simplify dizzyingly complex problems. Inevitably, they focus on one or two resources, fall prey to planning fads and succumb to pressure from interest groups." --Alan Cooperman, Washington Post Book World -- Washington Post Book World

As O'Toole shows, whether it's failed "smart growth" schemes, oppressive zoning policies, expensive light-rail boondoggles or mismanagement of public forests, government planners have caused us trouble and cost us freedoms. Their misguided, top-down, faddish rules and regulations have brought us higher housing prices, more-crowded roads and forests that are susceptible to diseases and catastrophic fires. O'Toole says it's time to liberate society from planners' control. -- Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 10/28/07, Bill Steigerwald