Marketing Poverty
It is an immutable law of nature that every action engenders a reciprocal and contrary reaction. It does not apply only to Newtonian laws of motion.
This is universally overlooked by politicians making rules. They want the rule in the first place, for their own reasons. So the contrary effects of the rule are ignored. Recognizing the contrary effects a rule would cause would not help get the rule passed. So those effects are ignored.
But even a person who is critically looking at the rule can mistakenly overlook that “reactive effect.”
We naturally expect things to work to order. If we do something with an intended result we presume that the result will follow. This is constantly reinforced in everyday life. The myriad little chores we perform generally go as we intend them. It is only natural and logical to expect larger endeavors to follow suit. The difference is not in the size or complexity of a job but in the perception. Let me use for an example a small chore which I am about to undertake. I will cut my grass using a power lawn mower.
So I cut the grass. It is now shorter and that is exactly what I intended. I do not immediately see other consequences of this action except for the clippings scattered in the yard and I expected that. According to the “reactive effect” there should also be a contrary result to what I have done. This can only mean that by making the grass shorter I have also made it longer. While it is not obvious that this contrary result has obtained we find on closer inspection that it has indeed. Perhaps “closer” inspection is not the right way to say it. It really takes a “longer” inspection.
If I conduct my examination more scientifically and have two identical plots of grass, using one for a control, I may see everything that is actually happening. I cut one plot without cutting the other. I must water and fertilize each plot exactly alike and be sure they receive equal sunlight, controlling all variables that might affect the result. Finally, I must take careful measurements. The uncut plot will be easy; I measure it once, at the end of the experiment. The cut plot must be carefully measured before and after each cutting.
Once I have done these things I expect I will find that the cut plot has grown far more than the uncut one. It cannot, indeed, do otherwise. The grass must grow to maturity and go to seed. It cannot escape its biological program. I frustrate that program by cutting it and the grass struggles all summer to catch up to its destiny of reproducing itself: the imperative motive of all living things. By cutting the grass I have made it grow. If the uncut grass grew as much as the cut grass it would grow to be two yards tall at the end of the summer. Which it never does if you don’t cut it.
This inherently contrary effect can be seen throughout nature. Things react against a stimulus frustrating the goal to which the stimulus would move it, in this case to the goal of nice short grass that I want in my yard.
Now let’s do a different experiment. Let’s wipe out poverty by giving money to poor people. In the first stroke it may seem to accomplish our purpose. Like the grass is immediately shortened the poverty disappears because now the poor people have money; they are no longer poor. But what happens next?
By paying for poverty we have created economic demand. The market responds to this demand by supplying poverty according to the immutable laws of supply and demand. Now the supply of poverty fills to meet the demand. This is only to say that more people will find the rules of the poverty handout manageable and culture their lives to accommodate it.
More money must now be handed out to pay for this poverty which again increases market demand for compliance with the rules that determine who gets the free money. As this phenomenon builds cyclically we soon have more people in poverty than when no money was available for it at all. In this way handing out money to assuage poverty increases the poverty.
Another example would be disability. It can be bought and will be provided by the market as abundantly as poverty. The social security administration got into the business of buying disability some time ago and has developed it into a multi-billion dollar industry.
They started paying for blindness; that seemed safe enough. No one is likely to actually blind himself to get the free money. That is too high a production cost. But reaching industrial stardom meant buying far more subtle disabilities than blindness. Eventually the Social Security Administration was even paying people for alcoholism, a boon for people who wanted an enjoyable way to produce disability to fill the demand and not a bad deal for the liquor industry, either. Imagine paying people to be alcoholics.
The word about the government buying alcoholism got around, however, and became an embarrassment. So the agency quit paying for alcoholism and drug addiction at the end of 1998. Now the commodities being purchased with your tax money runs to other optional disabilities, anxiety disorder, panic attacks (have a panic attack; get free money), post traumatic stress disorder, etc, etc. The neurological and psychological products are being sold and that is going down well politically. All manner of tolerable and indefinite conditions can now be hawked to the government.
The government is now buying just about anything you have to sell, if you are willing to supply it. And a lot of people always are.
And of course any government program creates demand for fraud and the amount of fraud that can be marketed to fill that demand is no less than literally undefined.
Where does this take us in the end? It cannot be foretold because there is no way to predict how far the blindness in government administration will go. We would like to think the people in charge of policy making were cognizant of these doubly working effects. Perhaps they are. The current policies feed the exponential growth of government, and if you are in government that’s a good thing. If you want to buy fraud, weakness and dependency and have the money to pay for it, you will have all you can afford.
