"The Unintended
Consequences of Political Good
Intentions"
from "In Defense of Rural
America"
By Ron Ewart,
President
National Association of Rural
Landowners
and nationally recognized author and
speaker on freedom and property rights issues.
©
Copyright Sunday, April 13, 2014 - All Rights
Reserved
As published on
Newswithviews, April 9, 2013
This article is also
available on our website at:
"Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good
intentions of those who create it." Milton
Friedman
"When a free nation
decides to exchange freedom for dependency on government, it ceases to be a free
nation."
War, as has been said so many
times, is Hell. So many people die or are maimed for
life, families are torn asunder, immeasurable property damage to
buildings and infrastructure, as well as the long-lasting hate between
cultures that takes generations to heal. Is it not noble, a good
intention, to want to find a way to bring an end to the madness of
war?
So many in the world suffer from hunger,
starvation, disease, pestilence, government abuse and civil unrest.
As humans, we have a powerful urge to want to ease the pain of the
sufferers. How could this good intention, be a bad thing?
A society of millions of souls becomes a complex
system of competing interests and it is a formidable and thankless task of those
charged with its management, to try and maintain order, keep the
competing factions happy without the whole system descending into chaos, a
worthy and good intention by any description.
Millions of illegal aliens stream
across the porous border of a country, most in search of a better life or
to escape persecution. How can it be wrong that the humanitarians among us
cry out for the salvation and emancipation of these homeless folks, by wanting
government to grant them amnesty, or a path to citizenship?
From the perspective of some of the most radical
or naive among us, man bears a striking resemblance to the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse in the environmental destruction of our planet.
Eco-systems die, wetlands eradicated, species go extinct and we dump our
collective human waste into the oceans and upon the land. Is it not right,
as a good intention, that the "some" want to have laws and regulations
passed by government to try and limit the extent of the alleged
damage?
Disease and the infirmities of old age have
plagued mankind since he walked out of the jungles many millennia ago.
Many citizens devote their education and their entire lives to the eradication
of diseases and the extension of our lives. Is this not one of the highest
callings, to heal the sick, extending life and make growing old a little
easier?
Let us examine how good intentions can
produce drastic, unintended consequences.
Wanting to bring an end to the Hell of war
is decidedly, a good intention. So we create an organization of
member-nation states (the UN) to discuss the
differences between us at the negotiating table and come to a compromise on the
means to stop all wars. The member nations draft up and agree on
plans and the means to reach this most laudable of all objectives, the cessation
of all wars. One such plan was drafted by the United Nations and it
was entitled FREEDOM FROM
WAR. This three-phase plan was delineated in the United States
Department of State Publication 7277, September 1961. Basically,
the grandiose plan's design was to disarm all nations, destroy all weapons of
mass destruction, create a superior United Nations peace-keeping force with
citizens from all nations, eliminate all nations' defensive or offensive forces
and the means to wage war, (except those forces necessary for
internal order) and to disarm the citizens of every member nation
state ..... a tall order by any definition.
Fortunately, at least for the United States and
the rest of the free nations of this world, this plan has so far, failed
miserably. Had it succeeded, history has proved that the unintended
consequences would have been enormous and would have left all
other nations highly vulnerable to any "state" that decided to ignore the
plan to end all wars and take advantage of those nations who naively threw
their sovereignty and their defenses to the winds on good intentions. Can
anyone say Russia? Some might remember the history behind the Treaty of
Versailles (June 1918) that finally brought an end
to World War I. The treaty was supposed to prevent Germany from
re-arming. Hitler thumbed his nose at the treaty and re-armed
anyway. The rest is one of the most tragic chapters
in history. We are definitely not ready for this "good
intention".
In any of hundreds of third-world
countries, hunger, starvation, disease, pestilence and persecution by
abusive governments are pervasive. In a torturous path to successive
good intentions and the exploitation of our collective guilty consciences for
the sufferers, our government convinces us that we are responsible, and by
law takes from those of us that produce (our sweat
equity and the product of our labors) and gives it to
those who produce nothing, because it is the humane thing to do.
They do so in spite of the fact that there is no constitutional
authority. In the process of foreign aid, third-world dictators are
rewarded with huge caches of our hard-earned fortunes, directed to their
own ends, with little or none being distributed to those in
need. The examples would fill volumes.
In addition, government convinces us that
it is OK to let the unwashed hordes of other countries to sweep into our
country by the millions and it is our responsibility to care for these
folks who trample on our laws and our generosity. Government demands
that it is our absolute duty to grant them outright amnesty or a path to
citizenship. The unintended consequences of government's good intentions
(or hidden political agenda) only
burden those who play by the rules in the form of exponentially
rising taxes, crowded out of necessary government services, increasing crime and
disease, lost jobs and an uneducated group of incoming socialists who eventually
get to vote for other socialists to keep their benefits coming. It takes
no brainpower to determine who are the socialists in our midst.
But then comes how to manage a country of
315,000,000 people that are governed by the rule of law. At best, it
is a complex task. In order to maintain reasonable control, the "managers"
(government) try to balance all the competing
interests, agendas and biases of the masses and come up with a system of laws to
accomplish this purpose. In their headlong rush of good intentions to be
fair to everybody, they create a system of laws so complex, overlapping and
conflicting, that it only exacerbates the competing interests, agendas and
biases of those masses. One of the results is crushing regulation.
The unintended consequences are a divided citizenry and mad scrambles to
change laws for the benefit of some special interest. All the
while a good share of the masses have their outstretched hands to the
government for whatever they can get. Not a pretty picture of
self-rule, is it? This is what happens when a government and the
people continue to break with the principles of freedom.
And what about the alleged damage
done to the environment by reckless and self-absorbed humans? What comes
from this egregious myth is the birth of a religion, or better
yet, a cult ..... a cult steeped in mindless emotion and guilt
that uses that emotion and the guilt of others to propagandize a
solution. Phase one of the solution is to convince the people that they
are guilty of the damage and without equivocation, they are obligated to the
costs and sacrifices of phase two, relinquishing all constitutional rights to
freedom, liberty and property rights in the name of the environment.
This irrational rationale is based on the premise that only large
governments and non-governmental organizations are wise enough to properly
manage all the land and oceans of the Earth, for the benefit of the environment
and mankind. The unintended consequences in a free society are
self-evident, the loss of freedom and the severe depletion of our
wallets.
Finally, government, in spite of its good
intentions, can come to fear 315,000,000 people, as it only takes a small
fraction of that 315,000,000 to upset the applecart. So government makes
plans on how to handle that unruly fraction in order to prevent a
disabling uprising. In America, there are two such ways
that government can draft these plans with the force of law. The first is
by passage of a law or laws by Congress, or our
massive bureaucracy. The second is by presidential executive
order. On February 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy passed ten
(10) executive orders to deal with just such an uprising, under the
constitutional power of the president to declare a national
emergency.
No. 10995 - Authorized the appropriate
federal agency to seize and operate all communications media in an "emergency".
No. 10997 - Provided for the federal seizure
of all electric power, oil and gas, fuels, and minerals.
No. 10998 - Authorized the seizure of all
food resources and farms, including all farm equipment.
No. 10999 - Authorized the seizure of the
means of transportation, and federal control of highways and seaports.
No. 11000 - Provided for the mobilization of
all civilians into a federal work force.
No. 11001 - Provided for the federal
takeover of all health, education, and welfare activities.
No. 11002 - Authorized the Postmaster
General to conduct a national registration of all persons.
No. 11003 - Authorized the federal
government to seize all airports and aircraft.
No. 11004 - Authorized a Housing and Home
Finance Agency to re-locate communities, build new housing with public funds,
designate areas to be abandoned as unsafe, and establish new locations for
populations.
No. 11005 - Allowed the government to seize
and operate all railroads, inland waterways, and public storage facilities.
All presidents since have renewed these
executive orders and added more sections to increase the president's
power.
Could this be government paranoia? How
many of you knew that these executive orders even existed, or are listed in the
Federal Register, or have the force of law? How many of you
doubt that government will use these laws in just such an emergency? How
many of you know that there are other plans to implement the use of the U. S.
Military on our own soil, in direct violation of Posse Comitatus
statutes (18 USC Para. 1385)? If this potential to
assume ABSOLUTE power by the United States government doesn't scare you, it
is quite possible that your head is firmly buried in the sand. These
executive orders and other plans hardly represent the preservation,
protection and defense of the U. S. Constitution. They
hardly are what the Founding Fathers had in mind for a Constitutional
Republic. They are in fact, the last nail in the coffin of the U. S.
Constitution.
In the final analysis, extending usurpation of greater power by
government beyond constitutional limits and the legislation and law
creation for good intentions to its absurdity, one arrives at a point where
there are so many laws that no one is in compliance and we end up losing our
ability to enforce any of them. In such event, the potential for a police
state rises exponentially. Some of the wiser ones know we are already
there.
Thus, the only answer is not in complexity, but in simplicity and fewer
laws. Ultimately, if we continue on the path we tread, we will
become as a rogue spider, spinning a web from which we shall be forever
entwined, or is it enslaved? Could
that be our final destination? Are
we to choke on our own obsessive/compulsive drive to complexity, in the pursuit
of absolute power under the guise of good intentions?
The ultimate unintended
consequences of unfounded good intentions are the slowly increasing power
of government and the loss of individual freedom. The solution is to
return to the foundation of all of our laws that made us the most powerful,
creative, ingenuous and generous nation on Earth ..... a return to the
Constitution that laid out a blue print to govern our individual and
collective affairs and maintain and defend our God-given freedoms under a
Constitutional Republic. To do otherwise is sovereign, political and
individual suicide. Without intervention by WE THE PEOPLE,
we get closer by the day.
If you don't want to be a slave to
government's unintended consequences of their alleged good intentions, we
strongly urge you to visit our two websites HERE and HERE.
Both sites are dedicated to the preservation of unalienable individual
freedom, liberty and property rights, through information, useful tools and a
dash of inspiration.
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