the law of unintended consequences - part 1

I can't remember what talk show I heard the phrase "the law of unintended consequences" but whoever coined the term is one of the smartest out there. The basic meaning is that anything you do will have consequences you didn't intend and probably didn't anticipate. This is the "collateral damage" of legislation.
Today, my gripe is welfare and bailouts. I talked already about companies and our prolonging their failure, so now let's look at individuals. We have seen the unintended consequences of encouraging banks to lower their standards for mortgages; foreclosures of historic proportions and major institutions in danger of collapse. What happens if we rescue the individuals who got mortgages they would never have any chance of paying off? If we take those mortgages off the banks' hands and have a government bank oversee negotiating down the mortgage (the best possible way of fixing it by doing something that I can think of) responsible homeowners that can pay their bills because they made sure they weren't getting in over their heads will be pissed and will demand that they get a piece of the pie (possibly by artificially making themselves "unable to pay"). Secondly banks will walk away having dodged a bullet, but will probably have learned nothing. Next, the government will have flushed taxpayer money down the drain and will feel compelled to create laws to hamstring lending in the future to "keep this from happening again" and those who haven't bought a house yet because they were responsible will have a much tougher time of it.
Finally, the irresponsible buyers who bought too much house with nothing or near-nothing down will need to be judged by an institution that can only work in generalities due to how far it is removed from
those individuals. This will harm some that should be helped, help some who were scamming the system from the beginning, and eat up most of the money in bureaucracy.
What should the government do? how about start up a special type of non-profit organization with strict rules as to what percentage of the money it gets must go to the people being helped and a strong tax benefit for donating to these new non-profits. If we label the bill something like "non-profits for financial rescue" then the majority being started will have the goal of bailing out individuals who have fallen on hard times financially, but being close to those individuals will allow them to spot fraud easier.

I'm sure there's consequences of this that I haven't noticed, so post any you see

Why captitalism stinks

Pure capitalism ignores the greed in the hearts of all humans and thus needs safeguards to protect against monopolies. The trouble is that corporations can buy off politicians so that they look the other way as companies get themselves as close to monopoly status as the law will allow (sometimes further). Worse yet, the abuses of business cause a backlash of popular opinion that can be played by politicians to both intimidate companies that won't "play" and quietly issue favors to their pet CEOs in the fine print of bills that are supposed to punish the "evil rich people".

Guess what I think is going on with the current economic crisis?
Yep, we got "regulation" without oversight and caused grief for small banks
while allowing big banks to make loans that would never be able to be paid, but made money in the short term so their CEOs could make insane bonuses and direct the company to make campaign contributions.

The worst part is that our trying to fix capitalism with socialist/communist ideas will end up causing more misery than fiddling while the economy burns. The short term may see a lessening of the misery, but it will keep flawed business models in place so they can continue to fail, continue to waste taxpayer money, and continue to keep out the new startup companies that know how to run a business and know how to change with the market.

America has been the greatest nation because it subscribed to individual freedom to choose the course for your own life (granting upward mobility in the financial class system), a representative democracy (giving us the power to elect leaders that will fight the abuses of corporations), a limited federal government (keeping politicians from having too much say in the workings of businesses they weren't trained to run), and a strong work ethic with a safety net no one wanted to be caught by (up until recently, you weren't given free money for not working, but had to seek out your local church for money and your government only gave you bulk food). Where these have been undermined is where our country has fallen on tough times.

sadly, communism and socialism are worse for the same reason that they ignore human greed, but for them it shows up in a lack of work ethic. Why work hard if you'll get paid the same as someone who doesn't?

Why all types of government stink

All governments stink almost as badly as anarchy.
Why? Simply put, it's because of greed.

Democracies quickly degenerate into oligarchies due to people realizing they can vote themselves a larger slice of money and power. Simply put, the majority can destroy the rights of the minorities over and over again until there is the cleverest minority with absolute power. Also, a pure democracy (where all decisions are voted on) can never function quickly, but is bogged down by bureaucracy (due to any six people having seven different strongly held and mutually exclusive ways to solve the problem) until a representative is voted decision making power (thus effectively killing the direct democracy in favor of either a representative democracy or a dictatorship). Examples of this include Rome and Star Wars. Constitutions and division of power last only as long as the elected officials respect the rule of law and the people hold their representatives' feet to the fire.

Monarchies, dictatorships, and oligarchies work well as long as the leaders respect a higher authority than themselves. They can also be held in check by fear of their people revolting, but this is normally dealt with by picking the least favorite group and attacking them until they are not a threat, then repeating the cycle until everyone is repressed. Once a ruler or group of rulers neither respect a higher authority nor fear their people, all decisions are made based on their own best interests.

A theocracy would be extremely tempting if you believe the religion that is in control, but is still corrupted by our sin nature of greed and pride. This time, it's mostly pride, due to the leaders thinking they have a monopoly on Divine revelation and thus find any question of dogma to be a personal affront to their divinely appointed leadership. As a Christian, I find this to be the most tempting and the most terrifying system. It is tempting to me because we have a constitution readily available (I would only use the ten commandments and selected sections of Mosaic Law dealing with the behavior of the rulers-particularly the ones ignored by the Israelite kings) I find this more scary than any other due to our sin nature that will quickly cause the human leadership to add their own interpretations to grey areas and then declare them to be inspired truth. The only way to keep a theocracy good is continual intense fear of God's imminent supernatural smiting for even minor misapplications and mistranslations of His commands.
As Darth Vader said: "Do not want"

In case I didn't make it clear earlier, Anarchy is even worse than these due to there being no rule of law to protect you from me and me from you. Without law, all we have is mob rule, and the only thing worse than one stupid person is a whole bunch of stupid people (and the stupidest are the people who think they're smart).

What do we have left? probably just a revolution every 150 years

not a utopia, not a dystopia

Ideas, I have them

I think too much and am constantly imagining ways this world can be made a better place. No one wants a dystopia (a society that has fallen apart such as robots enslaving mankind, collapse of the ecosystem, general anarchy, etc) and a utopia (perfect society) is impossible due to the evil in all of our hearts. If I were to implement all my ideas, I would create as close to a utopia as I could while setting restraints on the evil that will naturally show up in both society and government.

If you continue reading these posts, you'll see some ideas that would be great for the U.S.A. as well as others that wouldn't work with our society (and I'll try to remember to point these ones out)... and a few that are just plain nuts but are interesting enough to me to post anyway.

In case you're wondering, I'm a conservative evangelical Christian who believes the principles behind the Mosaic Law are the perfect foundation for a nation, but the details and implementation would only work for them and probably only at that period of time. You'll see what I mean as I get into my ideas.