Good intentions. Abysmal results.

The law of opposite results

Letter to the editor;

Sometimes a government action ends up giving the opposite of the intended results.

Just to make up a silly example, let’s say Town Hall wants to encourage children to fly kites. So they write a regulation mandating that only genuine blue spruce may be used for kite sticks, that only parachute nylon may be used for the air-foil, and that only three-ply cord may be used for the string.

What they have done, according to the law of opposite results, is to make it so expensive to fly kites that children cannot afford to do so without adult sponsors.

Here’s a real one. Congress wanted to do something for disabled people, so it voted for an extreme number of pages that someone else wrote detailing wheelchair access to public places. Well, they were done with good intentions – but according to the law of opposite results, it made it exceedingly expensive to be disabled – and fantastically expensive to allow wheelchair-bound persons onto the premises.

A really terrible example of this is when the Maine sank in Havana Harbor, Congress was stampeded into a war that nobody has ever been able to justify. Worse: When the Maine was raised, it was obvious that the explosion had been on the inside.

Notice that this is not to say that everything any government does will end up with the opposite results. It just tends to happen that way when Congress, the Legislature, or City Hall lets itself be stampeded into voting for some pre-fabricated bill that they did not think of themselves, write themselves, or discuss among themselves.

The moral to this story is that legislative bodies ought to write their own bills, limit them to one subject and not let “Chicken Little” tell them “the sky is falling”.

Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona