Especially when you’re talking about running other people’s lives. The food-stamps-for-candy controversy provides a pretty good example of the unintended consequences of public policy.So we want people to eat more? Give them food stamps. But they’re spending the food stamps on candy and soft drinks. So we tell them that they can’t spend the stamps on candy and soft drinks. Some of them sell the stamps at a discount outside the store. So we make that illegal. So we need new agencies (and new government budgets) to define what is and isn’t an “acceptable” use of food stamps and to enforce food stamp regulations.
But why stop there? Why don’t we go for the gusto and be completely paternalistic? Let’s forbid people to use food stamps for simple carbohydrates and foods laden with hydrogenated oils. Of course, this wouldn’t sit too well with snack food and agricultural lobbyists, so we would need to offer massive subsidies to sugar producers and farmers who are hurt by the new intervention... Do we see where all this is going?
The devil is quite literally in the details: a seemingly simple idea—that we want to help people who can’t afford to eat—gets really complicated and really expensive really fast. As usual, Mises was right—we should try to consider the unintended consequences before we even think about opening the Pandora’s Box of Public Policy.
