Government is a factory …
… that manufactures only two products:
- Laws. Rules, regulations, boundaries, and typically variations of thou shalt not.
- Money. Programs, subsidies, incentives, variations of we will pay you if.
(Hot air, which government produces in bulk, is merely an accidental byproduct.)
“Will the gentleman yield?”
Thinking of government this way helps clarify how government thinks of solutions and how it makes decisions.
Freshmen representatives arriving for Congressional orientation
If you have only two tools in your toolbox, then no matter the problem, by definition they are the only solutions you can offer:
- “Let’s make the problem illegal.”
- “Let’s give somebody a lot of money to make the problem go away.”
Of these two, from the perspective of an elected official, one is much more appealing. Money is finite; spend it on one thing and it is unavailable for another. But laws are open-ended; you can always make more.
Climbing the ladder of seniority is a wonderful thing ….
When confronted with a need for affordable housing, government will tend to have, as its first-order knee-jerk reaction, to regulate or prohibit something.
Since markets always clear, prohibitions almost always have perverse unintended consequences.
If government really wants an outcome, it must, however recalcitrantly, pay for it. But before being willing to pay for something, government usually spends several legislative sessions going through the pointless detour of prohibiting it, otherwise known as the King Canute strategy.
“I command rents to stop rising!”
