California Coastal Commission Blocks Hotel, Surfers Cheer the Wrong Team

Endorsing Bureaucratic Veto Power Hands Government a Tool That Cuts Both Ways

Published by Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat | California libertarian perspective.

The Applause Trap

California surfers celebrated when the Coastal Commission blocked another luxury hotel development last month on a sensitive coastal site, and the celebration was understandable: the development would have affected beach access, degraded a surf break, and contributed to the coastal privatisation that the surf community has fought since the 1960s. The problem with the celebration is the entity being celebrated. The California Coastal Commission is a regulatory body with substantial discretionary power over coastal land use, staffed by appointed commissioners accountable to no electorate, operating under procedures that environmental lawyers describe as among the most powerful administrative veto authorities in American government. When surfers cheer the Commission blocking a hotel, they are endorsing a power that the Commission has also used to block surf camps, restrict beach fire pits, regulate where surfers can park, and impose conditions on coastal access that serve Commission priorities rather than surfer priorities.

The libertarian tradition in California surfing is deep and genuine: surfers were practising civil disobedience against private beach exclusion before civil disobedience was a political strategy. The Malibu locals who forced beachfront property owners to acknowledge public access rights were doing property rights law before they knew the term. The surf community’s historical understanding that beach access is a commons that belongs to no one and must be defended against both government and private exclusion is the most coherent libertarian position available in the California coastal debate.

The Property Rights Alternative

The libertarian alternative to regulatory agency power over coastal development is not the absence of rules but the establishment of clear, enforced property rights that include the public’s rights in navigable waters and wet sand beach below the mean high tide line, combined with clear standards for what constitutes impermissible interference with those rights. Clear property rights are enforceable through courts, are predictable for all parties, and do not require discretionary agency decisions that depend on who the commissioners are and which political coalition has more influence at the time of the decision.

The Coastal Commission’s discretionary power produces results that the current political alignment of its principals supports. A different political alignment would produce different results. Property rights enforced by courts produce results that depend on legal standards rather than political alignment. According to Reason Magazine, the California coastal regulatory framework has produced housing scarcity alongside coastal protection because the same power that blocks hotels also blocks housing. The Mises Institute analyses coastal property rights from first principles. The tool that wins today’s fight is the tool that loses tomorrow’s. Free surfers need free beaches protected by law, not by agency favour.

The Long Game

The surf community’s engagement with the Coastal Commission is a long game that the community has been losing incrementally for decades, not because the Commission’s general environmental mission is wrong but because regulatory power that is accepted for good uses cannot be contained to good uses. The Commission that blocks the hotel today is the Commission that next year will impose conditions on a surfing access point that the community finds unreasonable, justified by the same broad authority that produced the hotel decision. The pattern of expanding regulatory authority using popular decisions to establish precedent for less popular ones is the pattern that libertarian analysis of administrative agencies consistently identifies. The coastal development regulations are not an exception. They are an example.

The broader lesson of the Coastal Commission debate is that the surf community’s political instincts — protect the ocean, defend public access, resist privatisation — are correct in their values and sometimes wrong in their institutional choices. Supporting a powerful, unaccountable administrative agency because it currently shares your values is the political equivalent of endorsing a weapon because it is currently pointed at someone you dislike. The weapon does not share your values. The agency does not share your values. Both serve the interests of whoever controls them, and control changes. The libertarian case for beach access is the case for protection that does not depend on agency favour: clear legal rights, enforced by courts, available to everyone who reaches the water regardless of which political coalition currently runs the commission that manages access to it.

The surf community is well-positioned to make this argument effectively because it has been on both sides of the commission’s decisions: beneficiary when the commission blocked development that would have harmed a break, opponent when the commission imposed conditions on access that the community found unreasonable. The experience of being on both sides is the experience that produces the most honest assessment of institutional power: it is not who controls the power that determines whether the power is appropriate. It is whether the power itself is appropriate. The commission’s power is broad enough to produce good outcomes and bad outcomes with equal legal authority. The appropriate response is to reduce the breadth of the power, not to celebrate the good outcomes while ignoring the bad ones.

The California coast at dawn, before the parking meters activate and the administrative machinery of coastal management begins its daily operations, is one of the finest available demonstrations of what freedom looks like in practice: the water does not require a permit, the waves do not charge for access, and the only rules that matter are the physics of fluid dynamics and the informal norms of the lineup. The rest — the fees, the designations, the regulations, the mandates — is the accumulated product of political choices made over decades by people who were not primarily thinking about what the surfer needs from a relationship with the state. The surfer who has paddled through the administrative barnacles to reach the lineup has done the work that liberty requires: navigating the gap between what the state allows and what the ocean offers, finding the freedom that exists between the regulations, and choosing the ocean over the paperwork every time the swell is worth it.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/