Lovely View. Pity It’s Blocking the Supply Chain.

America’s Supply Chain Collides With California’s Nimbyism — Virginia Postrel

Ryan Petersen, the chief executive of logistics company Flexport, recently rented a boat to get a close look at what was happening at the port of Long Beach, California. He then took to Twitter to report what he’d learned about why two of the nation’s largest ports — Long Beach and Los Angeles — have come to a virtual standstill.

“In a full 3 hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded,” he wrote. There were plenty of cranes, he observed, but nearly every spot holding containers was filled. With empties clogging the available space, new containers carrying goods from sea or land had nowhere to go. The result was a supply-chain logjam on an epic scale. 

It turned out that the main problem wasn’t an absolute space constraint but a local zoning regulation. Long Beach prohibits companies from stacking offloaded containers more than two high. The law is not a safety regulation but an aesthetic one: City officials decided that stacks of containers more than 8 feet high were too ugly to tolerate. So the voters in Long Beach gained a modest improvement in the view while the entire national — indeed global — economy suffered from less efficient shipping.

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Read the whole thing.

China Has Started Making the Same Mistakes as the Soviets — Hal Brands

Democrats Should Be Thanking Sinema and Manchin — Karl W. Smith

Rogers Chairman Fires Board for Firing Him for Firing CEO — Matt Levine

Are We Heading for a Repeat of the 2018 Stocks Selloff? — John Authers

The U.S. Should Rethink Public-Service Loan Forgiveness — Bloomberg’s editorial board

Billionaire Issa Brothers Face $1 Billion Asda Setback — Andrea Felsted

To Tax Billionaires, Democrats Should Keep It Simple — Alexis Leondis

Airlines Are Getting Ready to Fly Into an Uncertain Future — David Fickling

Three Reasons Inflation Isn’t Here to Stay — Tyler Cowen

This is the Weekend Edition of Bloomberg Opinion Today, a roundup of the most popular stories Bloomberg Opinion published this week based on web readership. New subscribers to the newsletter can sign up here.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Brooke Sample is an editor for Bloomberg Opinion. She was previously an editor at Euromoney Institutional Investor.

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