Saturday, June 07, 2008
The Road to Hell
Patterico's Pontifications has a case study in microeconomics showing how well-intentioned laws can have a perverse effect on those whom they were intended to benefit.
One thing that really scares me about the possibility of Obama winning with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate is that we will be inundated with well-meaning (and maybe not so well-meaning) legislation that ultimately will royally screw up our economy and perhaps lead to a worldwide depression as in the 1930s. I am not a scholar of history, but I know that "well-meaning" legislation played a huge part in creating the last depression (see Smoot-Hawley) and there's no guarantee that it won't happen again, because our elected representatives in Washington are largely even less historically literate than I am.
One of the panelists in one of the money programs on Fox News Channel this morning made the point that the Dems always create jobs. That may be true, but unfortunately many of those jobs are often make-work government jobs that don't do much for the economy as a whole. As things stand right now, I think both parties are guilty of going too far in their respective directions, especially when it comes to pork, but as between more government intervention in the economy and less, I prefer the latter.
One thing that really scares me about the possibility of Obama winning with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate is that we will be inundated with well-meaning (and maybe not so well-meaning) legislation that ultimately will royally screw up our economy and perhaps lead to a worldwide depression as in the 1930s. I am not a scholar of history, but I know that "well-meaning" legislation played a huge part in creating the last depression (see Smoot-Hawley) and there's no guarantee that it won't happen again, because our elected representatives in Washington are largely even less historically literate than I am.
One of the panelists in one of the money programs on Fox News Channel this morning made the point that the Dems always create jobs. That may be true, but unfortunately many of those jobs are often make-work government jobs that don't do much for the economy as a whole. As things stand right now, I think both parties are guilty of going too far in their respective directions, especially when it comes to pork, but as between more government intervention in the economy and less, I prefer the latter.
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