An Industrial Park from a Bloated Government

The enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it.

— Frederick Law Olmsted, "Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns" (1870)

A kid is still on the swings when the first truck backs in. Nobody closed the gate, nobody posted a notice on the bulletin board by the restrooms — the crew just arrives, cones off the strip of brush along the fence line where the tomato plants used to volunteer themselves every summer, and starts running a masticator through it while the soccer game on the worn grass thirty yards away plays on around the noise.

By the time the game ends, the strip is bare dirt, graded flat, waiting on a gravel delivery that comes Thursday. Nobody who was in the park that afternoon voted on this, was asked about it, or could have found the meeting where it was decided, because there wasn't one — not one that included them. The park is being rebuilt in real time, in front of the people using it, by a crew that has no reason to know or care that they're there.

The Park walked three postures a public good can take toward the land it's responsible for — fenced and gated, worn and organic, natural and unmanaged — and named the first of those the overvaluing posture: a park loved so anxiously that loving it consists mostly of restricting it, steel and liability law standing in for the actual thing a park was for. That essay stopped at restriction. It didn't have to.

Fencing off the swings and closing the grass for reseeding is what the overvaluing posture looks like when the budget behind it is a groundskeeper and a sign shop. It's worth asking what the same posture looks like once the budget behind it is a state government running the fourth-largest economy on Earth, awash in bond money, and no longer required to ask the people who use the park at all.

The money got large enough to stop asking

California is worth treating as the lead case for what this looks like in 2026, not because its politics are unique but because its scale gets there first. Start with the plain arithmetic. California's general fund budget, per the Legislative Analyst's Office's own tracking, roughly doubled across the decade running up to the 2022–23 fiscal year, when the state posted what was, at the time, the largest state budget surplus in American history — on the order of $100 billion, a single-year figure larger than the entire annual budget of most American states combined.

That same LAO turned around within two fiscal years and was forecasting a structural deficit on the order of $50 billion or more, a swing driven by a tax base leaning hard on capital-gains income that booms and busts with the stock market rather than tracking the state's actual population or needs. That volatility isn't a story about one bad budget cycle.

It sits next to the state's own well-documented, harder-to-dispute signs of a society straining under its own weight — the largest unsheltered homeless population of any state in the country by a wide margin, and consecutive years of net domestic outmigration, people leaving for other states faster than people arrive from them, even as the state's own spending kept climbing. A government that can't keep its own budget on the ground for two years running, in a state visibly losing residents and unable to house the ones who stay, is not a government whose capital projects deserve the benefit of the doubt when they show up in a park unannounced.

What Sacramento Is Deciding has already covered what that volatility does to a single legislative session's priorities. What it does to a park is a slower story, and a stranger one. Money at that scale was never going to arrive as better stewardship — a groundskeeper with the time and standing to actually know a park's worn paths and volunteer tomatoes, and to work with that dimensionality instead of against it. It arrives as capital projects, bond-funded resilience programs, and state contracts run by agencies whose actual relationship to the specific park they're standing in was never load-bearing to begin with.

The doctrine that makes the commission optional

Here's the part that isn't a metaphor, and it predates the current spending by seventy years. Hall v. City of Taft, decided by the California Supreme Court in 1956, settled a question that sounds narrow until you see what it actually does: does a state agency building on land it controls, for a governmental purpose, have to comply with local zoning at all? The court's answer was no — absent a specific statute saying otherwise, the state and its agencies are exempt from local zoning and land-use ordinances when they're performing a governmental function, because the local ordinance is itself just a devolved exercise of the state's own police power, and the state doesn't need its own permission to act.

The Municipality Against the State already worked through the general version of this doctrine in a different fight, over Marblehead's zoning authority against the MBTA Communities Act: a town's land-use power was never a fourth sovereign standing beside the state, it's the state's own reserved authority, devolved as policy, revocable the same way it was granted. Hall v. Taft is that same holding, run against a city's own parks commission rather than its zoning board — a citizen body appointed specifically to have a say over exactly this ground, standing in the way of a state capital project that, legally, was never actually required to check with it.

Ask a city's own Public Works department directly whether work framed as safety — brush clearance, fire-access grading, tree removal flagged as a hazard — requires notifying the Parks and Recreation Commission before it happens, and a department operating well within its actual legal authority can answer no. Palo Alto's is no exception to that authority, not an outlier abusing it: a safety designation is precisely the category of decision Hall v. Taft and its descendants leave inside the executive branch's own discretion, because a commission's review power was only ever as broad as whatever the city or the state chose to devolve to it, and safety work has rarely been devolved all the way down.

The commission can be told after the fact, at its next scheduled meeting, as an informational item rather than a vote — which is not a loophole anyone is exploiting. It is the doctrine working exactly as designed, decades before this budget existed to fund the crew doing the clearing.

Emergency authority widens the gap further, and it's widened considerably in the years this series has been running. California's own Public Resources Code exempts emergency actions from CEQA review outright, and the Governor's own authority under the Emergency Services Act lets a state of emergency suspend regulatory statutes, including local permitting requirements, for the duration. Wildfire resilience — fuel reduction, vegetation removal, grading for fire-access roads — has been declared under exactly that authority repeatedly across the years this site has covered California's legislature, which means the category of work most likely to show up with heavy equipment inside a city or regional park is also, structurally, the category least likely to ever cross the desk of the citizen commission nominally responsible for that park's care.

What the exemption actually looks like on the ground

None of this requires a single villain deciding to bulldoze a park out of spite. It requires exactly what A Meadow of Sacred Cows already named as the shape a diffuse-cost arrangement always takes: a state contractor executing a fuel-reduction or resilience-grading scope of work sized for liability and maintainability, because those are the only two variables the contract was written to score against.

Mastication equipment doesn't distinguish a volunteer tomato patch from invasive brush; a grading crew clearing a fire-access lane doesn't have "leave the fallen oak for the beetles" anywhere on its punch list, because The Park's worn posture and natural posture were never inputs to a state capital project's specification in the first place — only the fenced posture's own variables, risk and upkeep cost, were ever on the drawing the contractor was handed.

Clean, maintainable, low-litigation-exposure concrete or compacted gravel isn't a betrayal of the overvaluing posture The Park described. It's that posture completed — the version you get once the party executing it has a budget an order of magnitude larger than a parks department ever had, and no longer needs a parks commission's sign-off to act on its own logic all the way through.

The knowledge a punch list doesn't have

Hayek gave this exact failure a name decades before any of the doctrine above existed, and it's worth reaching for his version specifically, because it locates the problem somewhere sharper than bad incentives. In "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945) he argues that the relevant knowledge in any complex social arrangement "never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess" — the knowledge of the tomato plants, the mismatched bench slat, the deer path, is exactly the kind Hayek meant by "the particular circumstances of time and place," knowledge that by its nature cannot be collected into a central agency's file, let alone a contractor's scope of work, no matter how well-intentioned the agency or how large its budget.

A masticator crew running a punch list scored on liability and upkeep cost isn't failing to care about the worn path. It structurally cannot know the worn path is there in any form its instructions could act on.

That's also, it turns out, close to the same distinction The Park was already drawing through Durkheim and Lao-Tzu, given Hayek's own vocabulary for it. His later work, Law, Legislation and Liberty and The Fatal Conceit, split social order into taxis — a made order, deliberately arranged by a single directing will, like an army or a building — and cosmos — a grown order, the unplanned result of many individuals each pursuing their own purposes, coherent without anyone having designed the whole.

The Park's fenced posture is taxis in landscaping; its worn and natural postures are cosmos, self-organizing exactly the way Hayek said a market or a common-law system does, without a central authority approving each tomato plant. What a state contract does to a park isn't just an exemption problem or a consent problem, both of which this essay has already named. It's a category error: applying taxis's tools — a spec, a punch list, a liability score — to a cosmos that was never going to survive being specified, because the thing that made it worth having wasn't in the spec to begin with.

Proudhon's distinction, applied to who actually has a claim here

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's most famous line, "property is theft," gets quoted far more often than it gets read in context, and the context is exactly what this essay needs. What Is Property? (1840) wasn't an attack on the idea of holding land at all — it was an attack on a specific legal inheritance from Roman law, the jus utendi et abutendi, the right to use and to abuse one's own, to neglect it, exclude others from it, or extract from it without ever actually occupying or working it.

Proudhon set that abstraction against what he called possession: a right grounded in actual, ongoing use, the kind a person or a community earns simply by being the one who tends the ground and depends on it. Property, in his sense, was theft specifically because it let a title-holder collect the value of land occupied by someone else's labor and presence, without ever being present themselves. Possession was legitimate for the opposite reason — it never claimed more than the claimant was actually there to use.

A state agency directing a resilience contract into a park it has never walked, doesn't maintain day to day, and knows only as a scope of work and a liability line, is Proudhon's absentee proprietor with a public-sector title instead of a private one — the distinction he drew was never about which sector was doing the holding, only about whether the holder was actually present in the thing held. The kids on the swings, the resident who planted the tomatoes, the commission that meets in the building overlooking the grass: those are the park's possessors in exactly Proudhon's sense, the parties whose claim rests on being there.

Hall v. Taft gives the state's abstract title priority over that possession as a matter of settled law. Proudhon's whole argument was that the priority runs the other way on the merits, regardless of what the title says — which makes this park a plainer instance of his complaint than most of the property he actually wrote about, because here the absentee holder isn't even collecting rent. It's spending money it doesn't have to justify to pave over people who are standing on the ground while it does.

The sixty percent, with a bulldozer

Cultures of Life and Death named the sixty percent who overvalue life and arrive at death's ground anyway, by their own activity — not people who hate life, people whose defense of it against every conceivable risk becomes the very thing that empties it out. A government organized entirely around eliminating liability and minimizing upkeep cost is that posture at institutional scale, and a paved-over park is what it produces once it has the money to finish the job rather than merely fence off pieces of it.

The tomato plants, the mismatched bench plank, the fallen oak going to beetles — none of it was ever a maintenance failure. The Park already said so. It's the actual mechanism by which a place stays alive, and it's also, not coincidentally, exactly the kind of unscored, unbudgeted, undocumented aliveness a liability-and-upkeep contract has no line item for and no reason to preserve.

A government that feeds and elects itself doesn't need our consent

There's a plainer way to say all of this, underneath the case law and the budget tables. A government whose growth is driven by what sustains its own apparatus — the contracts, the crews, the equipment fleets, the agencies that justify next year's line item by having spent this year's — has no structural reason to spend on what the people it serves would actually choose, given the choice. Those two things aren't the same spending, and a large enough government stops needing them to be, because it doesn't have to win the argument anymore. It just has to keep the argument from happening.

That's what the exemptions actually are, once you stop reading them as neutral legal technicalities and start reading them as load-bearing. Hall v. Taft, the CEQA safety carve-out, the emergency declaration that suspends local permitting — none of them were written as a plan to avoid consent. But together they function as exactly that, because a park graded and paved without ever going before the people who use it is a social outcome nobody was ever asked to approve, and the honest suspicion is that it's an outcome most of them wouldn't approve if the vote were actually put to them.

A government that fed itself instead of its residents wouldn't need to fear that vote happening. It would just need the vote to never come up — which is precisely what a doctrine settled seventy years before this budget existed, and an emergency authority renewed every fire season since, already guarantees without anyone having to say so out loud.

Liberty isn't only a human claim on this ground

Every argument so far has been about who among the people has the standing to consent — the commission, the resident with the tomatoes, the kid on the swings. The Park's natural posture already pointed past that, and it's worth naming what it was pointing at directly: land left to a cosmos rather than forced into a taxis isn't merely unmanaged, it's exercising the only kind of liberty ground can exercise — building itself, one fallen log and one volunteer seedling at a time, on no schedule anyone imposed and answering to no plan anyone drew. Personal Sovereignty's whole case for a person is that judgment belongs closest to where the consequences land. A worn or natural park is the same claim, made by soil and root systems instead of a person, and just as real for not having a vote to cast on its own behalf.

A masticator crew doesn't only override the commission that was never asked and the residents who were never consulted. It overrides the one party in this whole arrangement that was already governing itself competently, without a budget, a contract, or a doctrine — and does it in the name of safety, for ground that was never actually unsafe, only unplanned.

The test, one more time

The Park and Order In The Court both set the same bar for calling something a public good honestly: it has to be genuinely optional, and it has to cost nothing to the people who never wanted it. A park graded and paved by a state contractor, under an emergency exemption a local commission never voted on, funded by a budget that ballooned and cratered on a tax base most of that park's neighbors had no hand in, fails both halves at once — not optional, since nobody who uses that ground got a vote on the scope of work; and not costless, since the diffuse loss is exactly the kind A Meadow of Sacred Cows already described as landing everywhere and organizing nowhere.

The fenced park The Park first described still had a gate, and a sign, and — somewhere behind both — a parks commission that had, at least once, said yes to the fence. The fourth park doesn't need that yes anymore. It just needs a big enough contract, and a doctrine seventy years old that already settled, long before this budget existed to spend, whose signature was never actually required.