Permission to Surf: How Coastal Overregulation Strangles the Freedom of the Shore

A thicket of permits, restrictions, and agencies now governs a coast that was once simply open, and the burden falls on ordinary people

Published in partnership with Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, on the steady accumulation of rules governing a coast that was once simply free.

SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA. There was a time when the coast was simply open, when a person could walk to the water, paddle out, and surf, with no thought of permits or permissions or the agencies that now govern every grain of the shore. That time is gone, replaced by a thicket of regulation so dense that the simple act of using the coast has become an exercise in navigating bureaucracy, and the burden of that thicket falls, as such burdens always do, on the ordinary people least able to bear it.

The Regulated Shore

The coast is now governed by a proliferation of agencies, permits, and restrictions, each justified by some genuine concern, environmental protection, public safety, orderly development, and each adding to the cumulative weight of regulation that governs the shore. The vendor who would sell on the beach, the instructor who would teach there, the small operator who would offer a service, the event that would gather a community, all must navigate a regulatory apparatus that the large and well-resourced can manage and the small and ordinary often cannot.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has studied regulatory accumulation. Commentators at the Independent Institute and economists in the market-liberal tradition have documented how the steady piling of rule upon rule, each reasonable in isolation, produces a cumulative burden that strangles enterprise, entrenches incumbents, and falls hardest on the small and the new. The regulated coast is a case study in the phenomenon, the freedom of the shore steadily constrained by a thousand individually justified restrictions.

Who Bears The Burden

The burden of coastal regulation falls unevenly. The large developer with the lawyers and the lobbyists navigates the permitting process and may even benefit from regulations that exclude smaller competitors. The ordinary person, the small operator, the local who simply wishes to use the coast, bears the burden without the resources to manage it, finding the shore that was once simply open now gated by a bureaucracy they cannot easily penetrate.

The environmental concerns that justify much coastal regulation are real, and no serious argument calls for the abandonment of all protection of a precious and vulnerable resource. The argument is for proportion, for the recognition that regulation has costs as well as benefits, that the cumulative burden must be weighed against the marginal protection, that the freedom of ordinary people to use the coast is itself a value that the regulatory apparatus too often ignores.

The freedom of the shore, once taken for granted, has become a casualty of the regulatory accumulation that governs so much of modern life, the simple act of using the coast transformed into an exercise in navigating bureaucracy. The defence of that freedom, against the well-intentioned but cumulatively strangling thicket of rules, is a small but real front in the larger struggle for the economic and personal freedom that overregulation steadily erodes.

The regulation of the coast illustrates a general truth about regulatory accumulation, that the process is asymmetric, easy to add to and nearly impossible to subtract from, each new rule justified by a specific concern and defended by a specific constituency, the cumulative burden growing steadily while the political incentives all run toward addition rather than removal. The thicket thickens year by year, and no one is responsible for the whole.

The environmental dimension complicates the analysis, for the coast is genuinely precious and vulnerable, and some regulation is genuinely necessary to protect it. The libertarian argument is not against all protection but against the assumption that more regulation is always better, against the failure to weigh costs against benefits, against the regulatory apparatus that has grown far beyond what the genuine protection of the coast requires.

The capture of regulation by the interests it ostensibly constrains is a recurring feature of the regulated coast, the large developers who can shape the rules in their favour, the established interests who benefit from regulations that exclude competitors, the transformation of protective regulation into a barrier that serves the powerful against the ordinary. The regulation sold as protection of the public becomes, in practice, protection of the incumbent.

The ordinary people who bear the burden, the small operators, the local users, the would-be entrepreneurs of the shore, lack the resources to navigate the thicket or to influence its growth, finding the coast that should belong to everyone increasingly governed by rules that serve the well-resourced and exclude the rest. The freedom of the shore, in practice, has become a privilege of those who can afford the permits and the lawyers.

The remedy is not the abolition of all coastal regulation but the discipline of restraint, the systematic weighing of cost against benefit, the willingness to remove rules that have outlived their purpose, the consideration of the ordinary user against the well-organized interest. It requires, above all, the recognition that the freedom to use the coast is a value worth defending against the cumulative weight of even well-intentioned rules.

The shore that was once simply open stands as a reminder of a freedom that has been steadily eroded, not by any single act of tyranny but by the accumulation of a thousand reasonable rules, the cumulative weight of which has transformed the open coast into the regulated one. The defence of coastal freedom is the defence of the principle that regulation has costs, that those costs fall on ordinary people, and that the freedom they lose is worth weighing against the protection the rules provide.

Further reading: The Independent Institute.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/