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[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I\u2019ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you\u2019ve read them all, I\u2019ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

I.

Today, pundits across the political spectrum bemoan America\u2019s inability to build.

Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called \u201cenvironmental review\u201d is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget\u2014or, like California\u2019s incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all.

Inevitably, such a complex set of dysfunctions must have an equally complex set of causes. It took us decades to get into this mess, and just as there\u2019s no one simple fix, there\u2019s no one simple inflection point in our history on which we can place all the blame.

But what if there was? What if there was, in fact, a single person we could blame for this entire state of affairs, a patsy from the past at whom we could all point our censorious fingers and shout, \u201cIt\u2019s that guy\u2019s fault!\u201d

There is such a person, suggests history professor Paul Sabin in his new book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. And he isn\u2019t isn\u2019t a mustache-twirling villain\u2014he\u2019s a liberal intellectual. If you know him for anything, it\u2019s probably for being the reason you know what a hanging chad is.

That\u2019s right: it\u2019s all Ralph Nader\u2019s fault.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-public-citizens