I should have given more context. In cases where incentives are deeply, structurally misaligned, and it will take heroic effort and significant luck to yield an order of magnitude improvement over the status quo, we should consider "letting it burn" as an option, and recognize the total cost of treating the symptoms. The global logistics quagmire may be a candidate for nuclear-ish options. Agree with you on the cancer patient scenario.
Let the containers on the streets piss people off to build pressure to align incentives, rather than prolonging the problem with a temporary stacking improvement. This is just a tool in our toolbox that we should not ignore, I'm not saying it's the right tool. But there is a cost of papering over the root cause, that's not free.
BTW I don't live in LA/Long Beach. I recognize that LA doesn't deserve the quality of life degradation, that's an externality. We have tools to resolve externalities. I could imagine living in an affected neighborhood in LA and being super grateful for the container stacking "quick fix".
But the temporary rule change is a quality of life improvement. Less trucks idling on the streets, less ships idling offshore means better air quality. Less ships anchored means less chance of another oil pipeline spill. More cargo hauled means more prosperity. A few months of eyesore are an acceptable cost.
The thing is, there is no fix to the root cause. You can either have cheaper products with just-in-time supply chains, or you can pay more for storage. The trade-off will always be efficiency or redundancy, and most industries have already chosen the level of risk they can accept. Real world systems have tipping points and bottlenecks, and it’s okay to use government to push them back into steady state.
The problem is that often the consequences of letting it burn are most felt by innocent bystanders, rather than the people who are meant to be "taught a lesson".
