It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Perhaps no truer words were ever spoken. Good intentions are a staple for busybodies and fundraisers everywhere. They are highlighted on every politician’s marquee and provide the impetus for virtually every governmental action.
To the leftist, good intentions represent virtue. The left is all about identity and signaling. Like the nonbeliever who only goes to church for appearances sake, many on the left believe identifying with good intentions reflects moral superiority. One need only signal virtue to win a merit badge.
Every government program boasts good intentions on the sign post out front, while the true motivations are routinely buried in the backyard. That is just the way it is. Listen to any political speech. Good intentions will be the focus almost to the complete exclusion of details and mechanisms. And conveniently, good intentions can be conjured as a guise for almost any action, including the most sinister.
Good intentions brought us affirmative action, a program that has promoted racism rather than rid us of it. Good intentions spawned the lending practices that led to the housing bubble. Good intentions produced COVID rescue plans that stimulated rampant inflation and were the pretense for needless lockdowns that only served to stunt the growth of our children.
We can assume our various national policies are well intended. But did those lofty intentions produce wise energy policy? Have they resulted in efficient, intelligent entitlement schemes? Have they created a border policy that best provides security to American citizens?
And what about homelessness? The welfare state is a direct descendent of good intentions. So why is it that homelessness was relatively rare before “the war on poverty” and is exploding now? There is obviously a factor more potent than intentions in play.
If we conclude that good intentions can easily be false flags, capable of being deployed to advocate almost any notion and that the true motivations are very difficult to know, on what grounds can reasonable folks determine the true value of a given policy? How can we reasonably predict whether a governmental action will provide a long-term benefit or merely result in wasteful or unintended consequences?
When weighing any proposal’s impact on human behavior, the primary consideration should be the incentives that idea puts into motion. Politicians often behave as if citizens are pawns on a chessboard and adopt policies designed to move the pieces as they desire. They fail to realize that these pieces are self-interested human beings with minds of their own.
Consider how many government housing allowances are doled out, only to be squandered by the homeless on alcohol and drugs? Government sets up the chess board but the pieces move themselves.
We know that the incentives put into motion by Biden’s war on fossil fuel drove up energy prices. The incentives of our entitlement programs have discouraged work. The incentives of our immigration policy coax thousands of unvetted poor to breach our border daily. And, the incentives within our defense policies continue to provide a blank check to the military industrial complex, not just to defend America but to fight another country’s war.
It is incentives that matter, not intentions or motivations. A tale about a guy named Tom captures the very essence of why acting on good intentions, without understanding the incentives put into motion, can easily produce an unintended consequence.
One day, while Tom was driving down a country road, he spied a wandering dog. As he slowed down, he noticed the poor thing was a rack of bones on the brink of starvation. A devout animal lover, Tom didn’t hesitate to bring home the pooch, which he later named Max.
Tom nursed the dog back to health on his beautiful one-acre country lot. Max was in paradise. One summer weekend, Tom threw a barbecue. He and his friends were talking sports and gazing across his grounds while burgers sizzled on the grill. Suddenly, Tom noticed his dog racing across the yard, chasing a rabbit until it was caught. Horrified, the animal lover rushed to the scene. Tom quickly wrestled the rabbit from the jaws of the dog before much damage could be done and set the unfortunate creature free.
Almost immediately, Tom felt kind of bad about what he done to Max. After all, the dog was just following instinct. Maybe he was hungry. So, in order to make up this perceived injustice, Tom led the hound to the grill and fed him a burger. Finally, Tom could relax, feeling both a sense of justice and benevolence about his resolution of the situation. That was until about 5 minutes later, when the dog reappeared at the grill with another rabbit in his teeth.