To me, and indeed historically, that a fear society & freed society are mutually exclusive.

& like all consistent lessons from history, we haven’t seemed to have learned this lesson and seem to be determined to repeat it.

Towards that end, the Wall Street Journal online published two articles on Friday, under the shared title, Undressing the Terror Threat. The first article by Paul Campos & Nate Silver explains correctly:

…The world’s greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and

(2) If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on Christmas Day. For two weeks now, this mildly troubling but essentially minor incident has dominated headlines and airwaves, and sent politicians from the president on down scurrying to outdo each other with statements that such incidents are “unacceptable,” and that all sorts of new and better procedures will be implemented to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Meanwhile, millions of travelers are being subjected to increasingly pointless and invasive searches and the resultant delays, such as the one that practically shut down Newark Liberty International Airport last week, after a man accidentally walked through the wrong gate, or Tuesday’s incident at a California airport, which closed for hours after a “potentially explosive substance” was found in a traveler’s luggage. (It turned out to be honey.)…

The authors make a very good point here, though I do object to the term “rather pathetic aspiring terrorist”… as I saw on a blog somewhere in retort “What you really need are suicide bombers with experience!”.

Beyond that, they then try to take some statistics too far.  Using murder & suicide rates to show how are fears aren’t lined up with a real assessment of risks, they write:

…The country’s homicide rate is approximately six times higher than that of most other developed nations; we have 15,000 more murders per year than we would if the rate were comparable to that of otherwise similar countries. Americans own around 200 million firearms, which is to say there are nearly as many privately owned guns as there are adults in the country. In addition, there are about 200,000 convicted murderers walking free in America today (there have been more than 600,000 murders in America over the past 30 years, and the average time served for the crime is about 12 years)….

Taking those numbers, they conclude that which doesn’t follow:

…Given these statistics, there is little doubt that banning private gun ownership and making life without parole mandatory for anyone convicted of murder would reduce the homicide rate in America significantly….

& Even though they aren’t advocating such a policy, they basically state that the number of guns in private hands necessarily affects either homicide or suicide rates.

I think this ignores the historical evidence that governments typically ban weapons prior to mass murdering their own citizens, but it also isn’t proven by the numbers they give.  Because regardless of how people kill themselves or others, removing the primary instrument doesn’t necessarily means those actions will halt.  Lastly of course, even that assumes the government has the ability to remove the primary instrument in question, which is highly unlikely.

Either way, overall they use the example that is hysteria over terrorism to show parallels to the war on drugs, traffic accidents, and other risks to conclude:

…What then is to be done? A little intelligence and a few drops of courage remind us that life is full of risk, and that of all the risks we confront in America every day, terrorism is a very minor one. Taking prudent steps to reasonably minimize the tiny threat we face from a few fanatic criminals need not grant them the attention they crave….

The thing is that I agree with the authors’ basic premise, or what seems to be their basic premise, that fear based policies are wrong, even though I disagree with the facts they’ve lined up and think that using terrorism as too narrow an example has severely undermined their case.

First, while it’s certainly true that the gap between objective terrorism threats and hysterical policies seems large, there are valid reasons for that.  They discuss one, which is we need to focus money on preventing mass catastrophes such as a nuclear detonation, but they fail to mention the organizations themselves and how they differ from murder in general.

It’s true, that in any free society, a lone nut, bent on killing others, will have the opportunity to do so and there’s little we can do, while maintaining a free society to prevent that from happening.

However, were terrorism and even gangs, the mob, and other criminal organizations differ is that we have to attack those organizations directly.  Dealing with each instance of terrorism as non-related criminal events is exactly what allows their organizations to gain grounds on operational abilities.  Ignoring the organization therefore, seems to dictate a increase in the likelihood of a major incident.

Outside these specific critiques however, I think our society has become very easily motivated by fears instead of reason and logic.  When we allow victims of drunk driving incidents dictate the driving laws, or say a murdered victim’s family members to seek emotional healing through a policy of revenge, or use those in the most destitute of scenarios to control medical policy… whatever it is, if  we allow fear to take a hold of our government policy, new legislation, or even on a personal level, allowing fear to control our own lives… if we allow this, we should at least be doing so with the knowledge that it’s not conducive to freedom.

Detailed Abstractions has more articles about fear based policies here, here, & here.

For months since the reelection of Iranian President Dictator, protests against the Islamic regime have ebbed and flowed.  DA (Detailed Abstractions) covered the reelection farse  here & here.  While the news was dismal, massive protests started in June and continue to this day.  The most recent protests staged on December 7th (via CNN):

Now I’m not a big fan of protests in most of the free world, but these students deserve the world’s attention.  Unlike protests in America, their heroic protests are done in the face of threats of violence against not only the protestors, but their families as well  (@Stratfor):

…Iranian Prosecutor General Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei announced Dec. 8 that “intelligence and security … forces have been ordered not to give any leeway to those who break the law, act against national security and disturb public order.”  He added that “families are responsible too if their children are arrested. They will have no right to complain.”…

Lest we forget though, every totalitarian terrorist regime in the world, is only beating  people for their own good:

“Our people can no longer take this… it is our duty to defend the rights of the people.”

That’s right – the regime is taking that stance that by actively preventing free speech through threats of violence tothe  protestors and their families they are in some way preserving the rights of others.

As Plato said:

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

Is it just me or does Vice President Joe Biden actually appear to be a non-member of the White House staff?

I could be seeing patterns where they don’t exist, but it seems that each time Mr. Biden opens his mouth, the WH either ignores it completely or attempts to restate it.

Remember  the swine flu thing? (at NPR):

“I would tell members of my family — and I have — that I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now,” Vice President Joe Biden said today as he made the rounds of the morning TV news shows. “It’s not just going into Mexico. If you’re any place in a confined aircraft and one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft.”…

Followed shortly thereafter by WH clarification (LA Times):

…”I think the vice president misrepresented what the vice president wanted to say,” said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs….

Later in the day, Gibbs was pressed about the discrepancy between Biden’s original words and the White House’s.

“I understand what he said. I’m telling you what he meant to say,” Gibbs said…

After proving his immense knowledge of swine flu, he went on to call Russia a crumbling system (@ Washington Times):

…Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was forced Sunday to correct publicly Mr. Biden’s characterization of Russia as a crumbling country, a description that infuriated Russian officials and contradicted President Obama’s efforts to “reset” relations with the world power….

Just like that one crazy uncle, he’s the comedic gift that keeps on giving.  This week, as the White House has pushed hard to show how the stimulus has worked, Mr. Biden started using words like “depression” (@ ABC News):

In recent weeks, Vice President Joe Biden has said that the U.S. economy has been in what he calls “a great recession” and has stressed that it is not a depression, echoing the general consensus of the nation’s economists.

But today the vice president took some liberty with the economic terms to illustrate the continuing struggles of the unemployed in the United States.

For the millions of Americans without a job, “it’s a depression,” Biden said….

In fact, not only does Biden seem to misrepresent the curent administration’s positions, he isn’t even internally consistent (ABC News):

…Just two weeks ago, Biden said that he calls the current state of the economy “the great recession” because it’s “the single worst economic circumstance” the United States has been in, “short of a depression.”

On Oct. 2, Biden said that “fears of a depression have been replaced by forecasts of recovery” and on Sept. 3 Biden said that “instead of talking about the beginning of a depression, we’re talking about the end of a recession eight months after taking office.”…

Now it’s true that some statements made by VPs are seemingly stupid only because the VP is being pushed to say things the President can ‘t.  This is especially true during campaigns, but also during any actual administration.

Either way – I’m truly torn.  On the one hand, I honestly hope Mr. Biden starts getting invited to WH briefings in order to reduce his perceived idiocy on the world stage.  On the other hand – almost every time he talks, I get a good laugh.

For more than 20 years now, with legislation leading back almost 40 years, the United States government has been pushing the idea that every citizen should have a home.

Based upon several studies showing high correlations with positive societal behavior for homeowners, politicians, leaders, non-profits, lots of people pushed for easier access to affordable housing.  In a Federal Reserve report published in 1999, they state:

A number of recent studies attempt to measure whether there are nontraditional benefits to homeownership, such as increases in the success of children (Green and White [5]), citizenship (DiPasquale and Glaeser [3]), and a variety of family outcomes and attitudes (Rossi and Weber [11])….

This is only 1/2 the story of course.  What these studies, our politicians, our leaders, & the rest of them  can’t conclude from this data is whether home ownership actually affects any of these additional traits.  The study itself hints at this:

…Because of the preferential tax treatment accorded homeowners, particularly low-income homeowners, and the large degree of wealth accumulated in housing, these authors argue that it is important to know the full range of homeownership benefits and costs. However, given the difficulty of credibly assigning causality to housing externalities, it is not surprising that such factors have been previously ignored.

In one such paper, Green and White [5] find a strong statistical correlation between homeownership and the likelihood of dropping out of school or becoming pregnant. Yet a reasonable interpretation of their result is that of omitted variable bias. Clearly, homeowners are different from renters along a variety of dimensions. As a result, those factors that are latent in their work, such as parental skills, interest in the educational process, wealth, and family stability, potentially bias upward any homeownership effect….

In other studies, they show correlations between home ownership & wealth accumulation, to help give more force to the “everyone needs a home” meme (study dated 2004):

For many years the federal government has promoted homeownership as an important goal for low-income families. A primary motivation of this policy goal is the concept that owner-occupied housing can be an important means of wealth accumulation, particularly for those lower-income and minority families that are able to purchase homes….

They as well admit the difficulty with this assessment:

…However, very little has been done in the housing literature to determine the importance of housing and non-housing sources of wealth accumulation. This determination has been difficult to address for three reasons. First, detailed wealth information on families is seldom available on a consistent basis. Second, such information on wealth is even less likely to be available over time so that changes in wealth can be observed. Third, the process of housing wealth accumulation is dynamic. Housing wealth accumulation depends critically on how soon a family that is renting becomes a homeowner, whether or not the family graduates to more highly valued owned units over time, or becomes a renter again and never regains homeownership….

With the current practice of press & political standards however, you might be hard pressed to find any evidence that assigning non-traditional benefits to home ownership is anything but an unqualified good.  The majority of reports dealing with low income housing stimulus are positive  (here & here).

In some cases, overly emotional logic is used (here):

After business dried up in May, Jodi Morris’ employer, an insurance agent, stopped sending paychecks.

Since then, the 43-year-old single mother has had to sell almost all of her furniture – her kitchen table and chairs, bed frames, dresser and armoire, and living room set – to pay the bills.  Morris and her 7-year-old daughter, Karly, now sleep on mattresses on the floor of their two-bedroom Ahwatukee apartment. And with no table, the two eat dinner on their cream-colored couch.

An eviction notice that arrived this month threatened to put Morris and Karly out on the street.  But Morris could be the first Phoenix resident to receive a lifeline from the federal government that seeks to rescue those on the verge of homelessness….

& without exception, our government is not immune.  The US government is right now, before the housing crisis even fully contracts (I wrote about it here), spending money to help low income families purchase homes.

Even before the housing crisis though, economists, experts, non-profits, were asking whether home ownership should be considered an unqualified good.  Unfortunately, reports questioning these basic assumptions are a very low percentage compared to the constant noise.

In some cases, even questioning the wisdom of subsidizing low income home ownership has resulted in kill the messenger attacks from non-profit groups, community leads, and even Democratic leadership, by leveling charges of racism.  With a simple misdirection trick, questioning the basic assumptions is anti-low income & since low-income households are generally minorities, questioning these assumptions must be due to institutional racism.   Politicians and leaders everywhere have a grand ole time setting up straw men in a fields of hay while standing by with gasoline and matches, but we should expect more.  We should expect to be able to ask all relevant questions we can and to get answers to as many questions as possible.  Lastly, we should let the data lead to its natural conclusion.

Assuming we truly want the best answers we can get and the best progress we can have, we must be willing to ask tough questions and live with the answers reality presents.

Anything less is little better than just allowing random superficial rhetoric to control policy.  It’s almost like we never moved away from the world Richard Feynman spoke about in 1974:

…But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.

Over at the Huffington Post, Keli Goff wrote an interesting, yet disturbingly short sighted piece about particular health care costs which exist in large part due to personal private choices.

She begins the piece titled Mad at Greedy Insurers for This Health Care Mess? Then Why Aren’t You Mad at Your Greedy Neighbors discussing the government’s bail out of private businesses:

Raise your hand if you are still filled with anger when you hear the name AIG and picture the more than $100 million of your tax dollars that were delegated–without your consent–for employee bonuses there.

Now raise your hand if you were angry when you learned that Citigroup (which has received so much bailout money that American taxpayers have been dubbed “its major stockholder”) was planning to spend $50 million of your money on a luxury jet….

Even though the numbers she sights are a far cry from the actual tax dollars given to private business, she uses the anger over the bail outs to compare with the lack of anger of health care costs related to personal choice:

…There is something inherently distasteful about being expected to foot the tax bill for someone else’s personal choices–particularly bad ones–and not being given any choice of your own in the matter. Which is why I am so surprised that there has been so little anger expressed by leaders on either side of the health care debate when it comes to the issue of personal choice and responsibility in health care…

…According to the Centers for Disease Control, “obesity costs our nation as much as $147 billion per year in direct health care costs and lost productivity.” And according to the nation’s oldest anti-smoking organization smoking costs taxpayers a whopping $300 billion dollars annually, or 1,000 times the amount of the AIG bonuses….

Utilizing this ratio of anger levels contrasted with actual dollars, she follows through by discussing the trait both costs have in common, personal responsibility:

…Some health care reform advocates will argue these costs would be lower if there were government subsidized health care, but my question is why should the government, specifically taxpayers, subsidize health care costs for conditions that are not only preventable but essentially chosen by the patient? With all of the anger surrounding the health care debate, at town halls, in the House and Senate, where is the anger about personal responsibility?…

Like many before her, she perfectly frames the clear distinction between individual actions which don’t harm others and societal responsibility.  She uses our innate disgust of having to foot the bill for the negative consequences of others and sees the fundamental issue of both problems.

If only she had stopped there.  If only she understood clearly that when I hurt myself, I should be the only one liable for the resolution, we’d be in total agreement.  Instead, she illogically assumes that individual responsibility is shared among all citizens:

…To be clear, personal responsibility is not only up to consumers.  Mayor Bloomberg’s success in curbing smoking in New York is due to a multi-pronged strategy of aggressively fining bars and restaurants that allow patrons to flout the anti-smoking ban and raising the cost of cigarettes, in essence targeting the dealer as much as the addict….

Not only is responsibility shared in her view, but government force is also the solution.  Therefore since targeting these “bad smoking” behaviors has coincided with a decrease in the number of smokers , why not continue these policies to control other “bad” behaviors?

…A similar strategy should be undertaken federally against fatty foods and drinks (including many of the ones I love).  But as long as groups like the AFL-CIO oppose efforts to hold Americans financially accountable for their personal health choices, so that the system can afford to treat those who do not choose to be sick…

Thinking more critically though, this turns out to be very short sighted thinking devoid of any historical context and antithetical to fundamental human behavior.  Indeed, I think most people agree with her that when people make bad decisions that affect only themselves, they should be solely responsible for the consequences.

Where she fails is in properly analyzing government as the solution.  If one fully analyzes her solution, the lack of follow through in her thinking becomes easily spotted.

First, we know that human behaviors are heavily influenced by incentives.  It’s natural and obvious; we do things that benefit us.  For those willing to see reality for what it is, examples are all around us.  We can see it in the use of commission programs for corporate sales force.  We see it in TV commercials and marketing campaigns.  We even see it in the tax code.   Through denial or lack of contemplation though, some fail to see that this same fundamental human behavior also affects our decisions as they relate to health care.

In fact, one of the reasons for rising health care costs and bad personal choices is individual consumers have been moved further and further away from the actual cost.   In the US, part of rise in health care costs can be attributed to  government incentives which pushed health care plans away from individuals and towards employers.  For the same reason, others countries with socialized medicine also see rapidly rising costs of health care.

Second, we also know that historically, when governments are given the power continue to assume more and more control over individual lives, it ends in tyranny.  As we allow government to assume more responsibility for individual actions, we necessitate their ability to control those actions.

Assuming we still believe in a free society, one of the prices we pay is having the responsibility for the negative consequences brought about by our choices.

For instance, if you smoke – society doesn’t owe you CHEMO.  If I you eat 30K calories a day – society doesn’t owe you gastric bypass surgery.  If you drink a bottle of whiskey a day – society doesn’t owe you a liver.

However, by not of following the logic of her solutions and ignoring historical contexts, she can safely and happily assume government control is the answer:

…So the next time you are reminded of how angry you are at AIG or any other institution that was “bailed out” with your money, just remember that AIG may have mugged you once, but McDonald’s and your neighbor keeping them in business (and whoever invented the doughnut, bacon cheeseburger), will be sucking your wallet dry for decades to come….

Which only leaves us in the end with nothing more than a false dichotomy as if we only have two choices:  either we pay for it or we control it.

Really, due to faulty logic, she has unwittingly made a very cogent argument against government provided health care.  IE – we don’t need to control that behavior if we are not paying for it.

But I don’t know if she understands that by continuing to promote societal responsibility for individual choices, she is also logically promoting less freedom and more government intrusion.  I don’t know if she even believes in the value and morality of freedom.  I also don’t know that she doesn’t fully understands all of this, but due to value differences only, still believes government control to be the answer to health care problems.  And I really don’t know which is worse – being wrong based upon ignorance or understanding the full ramifications of increased government control, but not caring.

The truly concerning part should be that it doesn’t matter which is worse as the results are always the same.   For as long as we have enough people with these types of beliefs, we will continue to lose more and more individual freedoms.

As Hayek stated:

“We must show that liberty is not merely one particular value but that it is the source and condition of most moral values. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.”

Gun advocates have long contended the anti-gun lobby is only using guns as a stepping stone to slowly remove other freedoms.  Like the saying, “They first came for the communists, but I wasn’t a communist.”  Indeed, this is truism that writers have told us for centuries: freedom is precious and must be protected.  As Hayek stated:

“If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.”

Well, not to be ones to go against a historical truth nor stop our descent into statism,  statists moved from guns, to smoking, to obesity.   We’ve seen smoking bans in most states, some so restrictive that it makes illegal smoking in tractor trailers as they are assumed to be a “place of business”, banning handguns in major cities,  to the banning of actual cooking ingredients such as transfats.

It never seems to dawn on any of the proponents, that each of these laws removes one additional freedom.  Nor do statists seem to understand that humans will find ways to behave exactly as they wish regardless.  This is especially true of economic regulations, but also of business regulations meant to influence individual behavior.

For instance, during the recent concentrated attacks on America’s obesity “problem”, many local and state governments have looked into legislating calorie counts and nutritional value be available on the menu itself.  Apparently, having to ask for the nutritional value which is already available was too difficult, hence the reason to further regulate.

It matters little that giving nutritional value by request or forcing it on the menu doesn’t to change behavior.  Than proposed bans on food advertising will have little effect:

George Mason University’s Todd Zywicki noted at a forum last summer that the average American child actually watches less TV than he did 15 years ago. What’s more, children face less exposure to food ads now than they did then, for a variety of reasons. The remote control has made ad-watching optional over the last 20 years, and more recent technology like TiVo may make traditional commercials completely obsolete…

Indeed, the reason also has little to do with good business, such as McDonald’s excelling by giving clients good tasting food at relatively cheap prices very quickly.  Research has shown:

…The economist Tomas Philipson and I have written about the economics of obesity. We have pointed out that the decline in the price of fatty foods, along with the rise in the opportunity cost of physical activity (work is more sedentary than it used to be, so one has to invest extra time to get exercise, and television and video games have increased the utility that people derive from sedentary leisure pursuits), explains the dramatic long-term increase in the percentage of Americans who are seriously overweight….

Same with gun control advocates.  They don’t seem to worry about inconvenient facts like banning handguns in very high crime areas does little to prevent crime, but does a lot in preventing citizens from exercising their freedom to self-defense.  In Chicago:

Far more of the guns seized at crime scenes in Illinois come from Illinois than any other state.

It doesn’t even matter that we can see the slippery slope happening right in front of us.  For instance,  if we can ban smoking in private business establishments, why not private vehicles?  Crazy you say?  It’s already happening in limited fashion as we speak for child custody cases.

No, proponents everywhere of using government force for your own good, don’t seem to be able to see any consequences other than their pet project.  All that seems to matter today, is that enough people think the action is bad and are willing to use government coercion as a means to an end.

For a country with a history of trying to prevent the exploitation of minority groups by the majority, and indeed a Constitution to enshrine that very ideal, we’re moving quickly into tyrannical rule by the majority.  Let’s all remember, that we are a Constitutional Republic, because true Democracy is nothing more than allowing 51% of the population to enslave 49% of the population by simple majority vote.

Unless you were lucky enough to be traveling or otherwise unavailable on Sunday, you were likely deluged with Mr. Obama’s media storm to sell not only health care, but apparently many other items as well.

First, it should be noted that this WH is above all, extremely insecure.  The President could be seen on 5 Sunday news shows: NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and Univision.   But he didn’t have time for Fox, the number one rated Sunday news show…

Regardless of the WH being extremely petty and worrying more about perceived injustices than an honest discussion with those who might disagree, what he actually said is far more serious.

When asked if a health care mandate was a tax increase on ABC’s this week, the President responded:

…”I absolutely reject that notion,” the president said….

“What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore,” said Obama. “Right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance . Nobody considers that a tax increase.”…

Using flawed logic is nothing new for Presidents, but this one isn’t even close.  Hhe’s analogizing the privilege of driving with the “privilege” of being a citizen.

The difference of course as that by my very birth, I have a “right” to be a citizen, whereas driving has always remained a privilege with constraints.  You see, I can forgo auto insurance, so long as I don’t drive.  There are many ways around without a car in this day and age, but if I “choose” to drive, then constraints can be placed on me.

Health care on the other hand would be required simply because I existed and no other reason.  & If the government says, “You have to buy this” – it is a tax increase as not paying it can land you in very serious legal troubles.

On CBS’s Face the Nation, with an omnipotent sense of when health care, our fearless leader goes further:

…Obama put his support behind the idea of taxing employers that offer high-cost insurance plans.

“I do think that giving a disincentive to insurance companies to offer Cadillac plans that don’t make people healthier is part of the way that we’re going to bring down health care costs for everybody over the long term,” Obama said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”…

Even ignoring the fact that this goes against his basic premise that more people need more health care, one wonders if there is anything our President doesn’t know.  So far, he’s taken over banks, car companies, told car companies with whom to merge, who to hire, who to fire, what to build… and now we find out he knows how much health care is too much.

But let’s not stop there.  Not only is our community organizer one of the smartest men in America when it comes to economics and health care, he’s also a brilliant strategist with respects to Afghanistan:

…”What I’m not also gonna do, though, is put the resource question before the strategy question,” Obama told NBC’s David Gregory on “Meet the Press.” “Until I’m satisfied that we’ve got the right strategy I’m not gonna be sending some young man or woman over there- beyond what we already have.”…

I’m not sure exactly what happens to man to think he has the answers to every single last question. Maybe it’s just arrogance and ignorance, as Hayek stated:

If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this.

Whatever the reason he believes so strongly in his ability to decide what’s best for our own good, history shows us without question where this inevitably leads.  Hayek again:

To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.

Let’s hope we begin to understand the value of humility before we do too much damage.

Unintended consequences.  An often used phrase for almost every piece of legislation pushed our politicians.  Whether it’s McCain-Feingold’s chilling effect on free political speech or whether bailing out banks which are “too big to fail” has actually decreased our long term viability instead of supporting it; the term seems to connote any consequence which wasn’t expressly mentioned by proponents of the bill.

Technically, that’s correct.  The definition of unintended consequences does not require the consequences to be unforeseen, though in common language we generally use the base meaning of “intention”.   Therefore the phrase has come to mean those consequences which were neither  intended nor unforeseen.

I submit however, that we should start changing our language and call known consequences intended consequences, because like the citizens in the face of the law our politicians should be held to the same standard: ignorance is not a defense.

Regardless of the human failing that pushes people to believe they, or their elected leaders, can ultimately control behavior which is already constrained by the marketplace, acting as if the results weren’t readily understood is disingenuous.

Looking more closely @ McCain-Feingold effects, we see the chilling of free-speech (here), where citizens can’t create a documentary on their beliefs about Hillary Clinton without it being subject to regulation:

…The case before the court, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, originated over whether a 2008 feature-length movie critical of then-presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton could be classified as an “electioneering communication” subject to regulation.

The FEC contended it was, and that its sponsor, a conservative advocacy group called Citizens United, was barred from promoting the film. While nonprofits can be exempt from campaign-finance regulations if they limit their fund-raising to donations from individuals, Citizens United fell under McCain-Feingold because it accepts business contributions….

Now.  I haven’t seen the movie nor do I care to, but when individuals get together to use their own money, their own resources, to produce their own political speech, the government has absolutely no right to be involved.  In the marketplace of political ideas, that whole “congress shall make no law” thingy, seemed pretty straight forward.

Regardless of your reading of the 1st Amendment, some will contend this is an unintended consequence.  I contend it was a known consequence and therefore must have been intended.

I will even go further and say this was like a consequence well enough known by politicians who voted for the bill, that they had incentive to pass restrictions on others as this would help them secure the current balance of power.

Using banks too big to fail (here):

…Increased concentration is vexing for regulators. Because systemically important firms can borrow more cheaply thanks to implicit state backing, small and medium-sized banks struggle to compete. A recent Fed study put big banks’ funding advantage at more than 30 basis points. That leads to another possible problem: indiscipline. Private firms with a low cost of funds and the taxpayer behind them are prone to recklessness: just look at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. America’s leading banks were too big to fail before the crisis. Now they are bigger still….

This was not only easy to foresee, but libertarians, conservatives, small business groups, think tanks, economists, literally, tens of thousands of people wrote and discussed that this is exactly what would happen.

Once you’ve effectively told the market that they will not be responsible for their failures, you’ve written them a blank check to become much more reckless than they would have otherwise.

Not only this, but that action, more reckless businesses, will have it’s own well understood consequence.  The banks will continue to make stupid decisions due to a perceived lack of risk.  As long as people allow it, the government will continue to bail them out until it becomes just too expensive.  Then during that emergency, we will see much greater regulation and control of the financial industry which might include a government takeover.

As Hayek stated and history has shown:

‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Maybe it’s time to start holding our politicians & leaders accountable for the known consequences & not just the stated ones.