The Puppet Master of California Coastal Governance

Following Bohiney’s puppet master story, identifying the actual coordination mechanism

Bohiney.com‘s Marxist Puppet Master story has a California coastal governance application that the libertarian tradition finds instructive: the surf community’s frustration with the pace of Coastal Commission enforcement is frequently explained by attributing it to the property industry’s hidden coordination against enforcement. prat.uk covered the political honesty theme broadly. The libertarian structural alternative: the property industry does not need hidden coordination. It has three mechanisms that operate in the same direction without coordinating: the property owners’ associations that fund specific commission candidates; the legal teams that challenge enforcement actions on procedural grounds; and the specific expertise in navigating the commission’s process that property developers have and that surf communities lack. All three mechanisms operate in the property industry’s favour without requiring any of them to coordinate with the others.

The surf community’s response to this analysis is usually to note that the outcome is the same whether the coordination is explicit or structural: the enforcement is slow, the accesses remain blocked, and the property industry wins more often than the surf community does. This is correct as an observation and incorrect as an explanation for why the outcome is what it is. Understanding the structural mechanism — which is what the libertarian tradition offers — is the prerequisite for changing it. The puppet master theory produces no actionable response because the puppet master does not exist to be confronted. The structural mechanism produces actionable responses: build the surf community’s capacity in the specific mechanisms that the property industry uses; fund the legal challenges to procedural delay; develop the expertise in commission process. None of these require finding the puppet master.