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**JULY 2, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

The Condo, the Inspector, the Market, and the Government

****

The Florida condo tragedy is an object lesson in why we can't trust
market forces and market players to keep us safe, right? And why we need
government, yes?

Well yes, but it's more complicated. For starters, there is the
practical problem of government getting corrupted.

South Florida has always been a bonanza for developers, who have immense
political influence. And government there has long been in developers'
pockets (in both senses of the metaphor).

The way this filters down is that we get inspectors like the corrupt or
incompetent Ross Prieto of Surfside, who kept giving the doomed condo
complex a clean bill of health
; the
kind of inspector who didn't make waves in the developer community.

Pull back to a wider-angle lens, and here's the broader problem:
Republicans hate government. Since Carter and Clinton, many Democrats
have joined Republicans in government-bashing. Developers are big
contributors to both.

Free-market economists, especially those of the "public choice" school,
contend that since government is so readily corrupted, we need to look
at how government works in practice, not how it could work in
theory-and just trust the discipline of the market.

But recent events have blown that theory to hell. Market forces allowed
these dangerous condos to be built on unstable landfills; market forces
created global climate change that creates sinking coastal cities; and
market forces did not produce adequate inspections or repairs. Market
forces, you could say, killed over a hundred people in Surfside, and
will kill hundreds of millions, probably billions, as climate change
worsens.

Face it, the only way to keep relatively safe is to elect people to run
the government who believe in the government, and who operate it
competently and relatively free of corruption. They are called
progressives.

All the rest is commentary. End of political economy lesson for today.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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