Top 5 Most Counter-Productive Political Ideas in Use in America - Page 2
Sometimes, political ideas are so pervasive that they are unaffected by repeated examples of their failure. In politics, people can learn to rationalize anything, and thus even some of the worst ideas ever birthed by the system can wind up being embraced as valuable tools. Below are, as I see it, the five best examples of this in modern America. These are ideas so bad that they are not only pointless, but counter-productive; they do the exact opposite of what they set out to do. And yet, there are legions of fans for each one, and none of them appear to be going away any time soon.
COMPREHENSIVE REFORM
 | | It's a real page-turner, and damn that cliffhanger at the end! |
With the president signing huge bills that measure in multiples of thousands of pages long, it is apparent that comprehensive reform is all the rage in Washington today. It didn't start with this president, of course, and it certainly won't end with him either. The fact remains that comprehensive reform bills will always be popular among politicians, for reasons I'll get to in a moment. First, let's consider the ideal of comprehensive reform and what it sets out to do.
Until we can come up with one that is perfect, any governmental system is bound to have flaws. Usually, those flaws become apparent the larger something gets, as in the case of tax law. For years, Congress may try to plug up one flaw at a time, even though, in the long run, every fix causes two more problems. Eventually, the system gets so complex, flawed, and drowned in red tape, people start demanding a new system (this even happens to whole governments). This is where comprehensive reform comes in. The idea is that the government can take some system (like, say, immigration law), tear down the existing structure, and rebuild the system from the ground up in a new and improved way. If this is what comprehensive reform actually did, I would be all for it, but of course, here it is on this list.
The problems arise because comprehensive reform attempts to do far too much at the same time. Special interests start competing, pork starts getting added all over the place, the public is no longer able to sift through the mess, and what winds up getting passed is some horrific Frankenstein monster that nobody fully understands. In the end, comprehensive reform leads to more--though different--problems, which creates a self-sustaining loop for politicians who can then propose a brand-new comprehensive reform package to fix the flaws in the last comprehensive reform package.
Advocates of such reform appeal to the holistic fallacy, the idea that the whole cannot exist without each and every part. If this were true (which it almost always isn't), it would be a bad law, because something with hundreds of different parts that all depend on each other is something that has far too many weak spots. Many of the most problematic systems in America today, like tax law, can only be solved by simpler systems, not more complex ones. Comprehensive tax reform could be done very quickly and easily by repealing a huge chunk of federal law and replacing it with simple, easy-to-understand language. It could be done with a bill of only one page, and those who are skeptical need only look at the United States Constitution, one of the shortest and most succinct governmental foundations this Earth has ever seen.
You see, the problem is complexity. The more complex a system is, the more flawed it will inevitably be. Addressing problems by adding a bunch of complexity all at once has never--and will never--make the system more efficient, fair, safe, or beloved. Unfortunately, politicians hate simplicity in their laws, which is why they are so in love with giant, sweeping bills that purport to comprehensively reform something. In a bill so large and complex that nobody knows what's really in it, a politician can throw in whatever he or she pleases, and chances are, no one will notice. And then, when things get bad again, that politician can run on creating even more reform, and so it goes, ad nauseam, and the problems never really get fixed.
SUBSTANCE PROHIBITION
 | | Thank God liquor is legal! |
From 1920 to 1933, alcohol was illegal in the United States. During this time, organized crime flourished and discovered racketeering, alcohol became more dangerous, alcohol-related deaths started to rise, overall alcohol consumption was only minimally affected, and tax revenues were crushed by the $500 million pricetag of alcohol enforcement. Unfortunately, following the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment, the lessons of prohibition were largely forgotten by our government, which immediately began a policy of drug prohibition.
Now there are governments--federal, state, and local--that talk seriously about bans on cigarettes, trans fats, excess salt, and even certain perfumes. Forget the assault this is on individual liberty and take a look at the results of prohibition of the past. The idea behind substance prohibition is that, if you can stop people from deliberately ingesting things that are bad for them, you will improve public health and lower crime rates. Unfortunately, prohibition causes the exact opposite results. I'm not suggesting a ban on fried foods will lead to seedy underground places where they sell black-market Long John Silver's, but no government has ever proven successful at legislating personal morality. Besides, when was the last time you looked at the pricetag for the war on drugs?
Advocates for prohibition make the fallacious assumption that, if something is legal, people will do it. However, if you compare the percentage of people who use a certain substance where it is illegal to those where it is decriminalized, the percentage is almost always higher in places where the substance is illegal. This seems to indicate that certain prohibitions, aside from being counter-productive in the results, are also counter-productive in their means. Making a substance illegal accomplishes nothing (or worse) when it comes to stopping the usage of that substance.
But the war on substances continues unabated. Our government spends billions of dollars every year, our prisons are getting overcrowded with people on drug offenses (usually thanks to the one-two punch of zero tolerance substance prohibition), crime flourishes on the revenues of drug sales, and emergency rooms get nightly visits from people who have used unsafe drugs they were forced to either brew at home or get from somebody in an alley. I'm not saying that decriminalization would eliminate the drug problem in this country, but it would certainly reverse our deficits, lower our crime rates, give the people more liberty, and improve our public health. Or is there some other reason for the Twenty-first Amendment?
ECONOMIC SANCTIONS
 | | Yeah, those sanctions are making North Korea a much better place |
Following World War II, it was a prevailing opinion that, in order to prevent another World War, all the nations of the world should be economically tied to each other. Therefore, attacking one nation would hurt your own, and if you wished to punish a nation without killing anyone, you could impose an economic sanction (cut off trade, essentially). Economic sanctions were not a new tool at the time, but they have certainly exploded in popularity in the sixty-five years that have followed.
Now, America can impose an economic trade sanction against another nation for any number of reasons. If our government disapproves of another nation's human rights violations, for example, it could cut off all trade with that nation. The bottom line, though, is that economic sanctions are supposed to be a way to avoid war and punish rogue states. By that measuring stick, economic sanctions are, historically, almost always a failure.
Two extreme examples from recent history are Iraq and Iran. We imposed economic sanctions against Iraq almost two decades ago in order to avoid having to go to war, and we all know how that turned out. As for Iran, our economic sanctions have done nothing to slow down the government (in fact, some have argued that those sanctions shielded Iran from the current global financial crisis), but have done wonders in slowing down the progress of a middle class that could rise up against its oppressive leaders. There are two reasons for this: (1) international business owners are the hardest hit from economic sanctions; and (2) when a government takes a financial hit from a foreign source, it usually makes up for it by taking money from the people.
Granted, every once in a blue moon, when conditions are just right and the entire world is united in sanctioning a specific country, sanctions can do good. Just look at South Africa. However, this is the exception, not the rule, because the entire world almost never reaches a consensus like that and unilateral sanctions are pathetic at best. For the vast majority of cases, economic sanctions tend to starve the people they are trying to protect while failing to prevent an inevitable war. In those cases, economic sanctions--just like zero tolerance enforcement strategies, abstinence-only sex education, huge comprehensive reform bills, and substance prohibition--do far more harm than good.
-e. magill 6/29/2010
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