By Jeff Childers

Let’s talk about 15-minute cities. They are nothing but repackaged socialism, perhaps more accurately described as actual fascism, but without all the goose stepping and funny mustaches. I will explain.

To set the table, I ran across this short video yesterday by a gentleman who understands the whole 15-minute philosophy, as he should. David Thunder is a philosopher, political scientist, and university professor, currently serving as a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra in Spain.

Thunder gets it, almost.

He really doesn’t care for the idea of 15-minutes cities, at all, which he eloquently described in his video as “highly-adversarial” technocratic social engineering, which “views citizens as pawns or children who need to be shepherded this way or that in accordance with a master plan thought up by clever social engineers and city councillors.” Thunder doubts these puffed-up social engineers are half as clever as they think they are, ruefully observing “the amount of hubris reflected in this is enormous.”

Thunder — an ACTUAL intellectual — knows enough to know what he doesn’t know, and is modestly offended by technocrats who, in his words, show a “lack of imagination” and display “a kind of prideful hubris [in] the idea that ‘we know best’ … [a] special class of people who because of their background and training can decide for everybody else what’s best for them and how they should live.”

What Thunder misses, or maybe he’s hinting at, is that 15-minutes cities are just more of the same old socialist central planning, tasteless political SPAM repackaged into a quaint European tin and relabeled as “new! organic! gluten-free! sustainable! fair-trade! high-protein food product.”

“The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism” was penned in 1988 by renowned conservative economist Friedrich Hayek, and is widely considered his most important book.

In the book, Hayek pretty conclusively proved exactly HOW socialism and central planning are inherently flawed and can never work. In sum, the reason is because of the unfounded assumption that a technocratic central authority can somehow acquire all the knowledge and information needed to make better decisions than the market can. Hayek said it was a “fatal conceit” to discard the vast, nearly-infinite dispersed knowledge and expertise of thousands or millions of self-interested individuals, all agglomerated into an ever-changing, constantly-responding free market. The market is infinitely better than central planners’ comparatively puny abilities that always — every single time, sooner or later — create inefficiencies, shortages, and unintended consequences.

Often the unintended consequences are deadly.

In the late 1950s, China’s new communist warmonger, so-called “Chairman” Mao Zedong, launched a New York Times-approved campaign that he promised would rapidly upgrade China’s economy from an agricultural to an industrial base, through a series of ambitious central planning moves collectively called “The Great Leap Forward.”

Designed by the smartest, most politically well-connected Chinese and the Chairman himself, the Great Leap Forward relied on a few central pillars. One of the most important of these key initiatives was the “backyard steel” program, which ordered China’s farmers to each build tiny barnyard smelting furnaces, so everyone could make steel products (instead of farming their crops). Chairman Mao conceived of a brilliant future where China launched its steel production and manufacturing capacity into high orbit, roaring past competitive nations into the industrial age, in a million tiny, decentralized, grassroots rockets.

You might call it Mao’s “15-minute steel” plan. In 1958, Mao promised, “With 11 million tons of steel next year and 17 million tons the year after, the world will be shaken. If we can reach 40 million tons in five years, we may possibly catch up with Great Britain in seven years. Add another eight years and we will catch up with the US.”

Not so much.

A middle-schooler could have predicted the titanic failure of Mao’s macabre, moronic plan, but the horrifying consequences were worse than anyone could possibly imagine. The backyard steel program led to widespread inefficiencies as unskilled peasants pilfered random pieces of scrap metal and whatever other low-quality metallic trash they could get their hands on to satisfy government quotas, using rusty junk iron to make tainted junk steel.

Building and tending the smelters predictably diverted time and effort away from planting and growing crops, which inevitably and quickly caused food shortages, famine, and mass casualties.

In the end, the so-called Great Leap Forward was a Great Leap into Disastrous Failure, killing tens of millions of Chinese through starvation, disease, and related causes. And China never even met its steel quotas. Mao’s campaign is one of the most grotesque examples in a long, deplorable catalogue of the dangers of hubris-fueled central planning and the hazards of prideful “top-down” economic programmes intended to perfect complex, poorly-understood social and economic systems.

Another, more recent example is the top-down approach taken to the pandemic, where prideful “expert” public health lunatics designed a worldwide ‘one-size fits all’ approach to containing a mild respiratory disease, killing more people through government mitigations than were actually saved from the virus.

Despite their horrible track record, socialists have never given up on their wild-eyed notion that politically-correct “experts” know better than the market and can somehow craft a more perfect Utopian union, through government-approved education and a religious conviction in the powers of technology.

15-minute steel, 15-minute cities; it’s always the same. Top-down central planning has never worked before, and it won’t work this time either. It won’t — can’t — create any carbon-neutral Utopian outposts. It won’t solve the problem of retailers fleeing crime-ridden, urban hellholes. Instead, it will create shortages, inefficiencies, and unintended consequences.

Like it always does.

Anyways, why do they want to oppress people with 15-minute cities? Wouldn’t 10-minute cities be better? Or how about 5-minute cities? Who wants to walk fifteen minutes to get a cup of coffee? How totalitarian. Fascists! They should make cities more like prison, where everything is just a moments’ walk down to the commissary.

Now THAT would be fair. Except somehow I don’t think the looney leaders plan to live in their wonderful x-minute cities. Those are just for all of us non-experts. Don’t worry though, mark my words, the 15-minute city will blow up on the launch pad.