One of the fundamental problems of central planning of any kind is what we systemic thinkers call the ‘Law of Unintended Consequences.’ It’s not really a law but it should be.
You know you’re dealing with an ‘unintended consequence’ of a policy when the politicians, bankers, regulators and their apologists in the media say something like, ‘well, you know, no one could have foreseen {fill in the blank}.”
Some of those blanks are:
- The Housing Bubble of 2005-07 which caused the financial crisis of 2008.
- The election of Donald Trump after decades of offering false choices to the American Electorate.
- Most recently the collapse of the Afghan government to the Taliban and the U.S.’s ignominious retreat.
These are all events, and there are dozens more in your everyday life if you just begin looking for them, which nobody in charge would ever admit to having considered possible when they embarked on a particular policy but in hindsight were inevitable.
Policies of collective action under the rubric of the State, defined as that entity with the power to point guns at people to enforce their edicts, always result in these unintended consequences. But it’s not because those outcomes weren’t predictable but rather because they weren’t important to the people who implemented them in the first place.