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Unintended consequences (17 Feb 2008)

The road to hell is paved with the good intentions of many a politician. With the best of intentions, Vermont passed a law banning billboards. What did they get instead? Giant “sculptures” that are probably at least as obnoxious. These monstrosities are examples of what happens when we try to write codes that our standing armies of lawyers cannot get around. Like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, they will find a way. There are many such examples of an unintended consequences … our next topic at Politics and a Pint.

Read more for other planned topics …

Planned future topics …

  • 17 Feb ‘08 - Unintended Consequences with a guest presentation by Stephen Kallestad.
  • 24 Feb ‘08 - The Golden Compass and the first amendment
  • 2 Mar ‘08 - “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed“, Jared Diamond, a discussion of the end of the industrial age, led by Alan Anderson.

This entry was posted on February 13, 2008 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Unintended consequences (17 Feb 2008)”

  1. BruceWMorlan Says:
    February 22, 2008 at 4:44 pm

    Now here is an interesting tidbit that ties to this theme …

    This experiment illustrates an unfortunate fact: when a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off the rose — once a social norm is trumped by a market norm — it will rarely return.

    Ref: NPR: Dissecting People’s ‘Predictably Irrational’ Behavior

  2. BruceWMorlan Says:
    March 5, 2008 at 2:50 pm

    Well, isn’t that special?

    Daylight Saving Wastes
    Energy, Study Says
    By JUSTIN LAHART
    February 27, 2008; Page D1

    (See Corrections and Amplifications item below.)

    For decades, conventional wisdom has held that daylight-saving time, which begins March 9, reduces energy use. But a unique situation in Indiana provides evidence challenging that view: Springing forward may actually waste energy.

    Ref: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120406767043794825-UOLcfJA8×9Gw9ozbCz77MiLmtaE_20080327.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

    Of course, part of the purpose of daylight savings time is to let humans use the daylight, but it is interesting that it COSTS us energy, so (to the extent that saving energy was the original idea), we again see that good intentions converted to policy without first confirming the science can be a bad bad bad idea.

    Now excuse me while I sip a glass of corn-based ethanol while I bask in the global warming pool.

  3. BruceWMorlan Says:
    May 1, 2008 at 5:52 pm

    A reader points us to an interesting article by an actual writer and thinker outside the box.

    Walter Williams notes that excess taxation (which, in the limit, becomes outright prohibition) leads to in the street scofflawery. Followers of P&aP know this already, but here is the full story.

    Cigarette Smuggling, crime popularized way back when in the movie “Beverly Hills Cop“.

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