Jackoby on Government Failure

Sunday, March 09, 2008

How government makes things worse - Jeff Jacoby writes about the law of unintended consequences and government failure in today’s Boston Globe. There are spooky parallels with failed government policies here at home.

“WHAT DO ethanol and the subprime mortgage meltdown have in common? Each is a good reminder of that most powerful of unwritten decrees, the Law of Unintended Consequences - and of the all-too-frequent tendency of solutions imposed by the state to exacerbate the harms they were meant to solve.”

Read the remainder of the article here

Posted to A2 Micro • AS Micro • Market Failure • Government Failure
Tags: government failure, unintended consequences
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Unintended consequences of the smoking ban

Saturday, February 09, 2008

by Geoff Riley

Any government intervention in the market can give us cause to consider the Law of Unintended Consequences where a policy decision or action leads to fresh actions which might not have been considered by those putting a policy in place. Some of these knock-on effects can be positive, a windfall that enhances the impact of the original decision. Others can be negative leading to fears of government failure and a deepening of an existing problem or market failure. The smoking ban seems to be providing a rich seam of examples of such unintended blow-back effects.

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