Every living thing in this world is linked, like or not, to everything else in this world. This isn't some weird Eastern Mystic proverb or some drugged up guru's insight. Everything that you do or don't do will affect everything else. But usually it will never be in the way you want, expect, or even notice.
This is my primary problem with Statists and other assorted central planners. They seek to control those aspects of everyone's life for the greater good (or just for power, depending on the individual). The problem is that whatever they do, they will end up affecting something else in an adverse way. And while it is nearly impossible to predict these cause and effect games initially, once they happen, it is difficult not to notice.
Take Mexico, for example. This is a country that is vigorously fighting the drug cartels as much as possible. But it is losing the war because the drug cartels make loads of money from people here in the United States. But you don't see any alcohol cartels, despite alcohol being just as addictive as some of the so-called 'hard drugs'. This is because alcohol is legal in the United States and this allows legitimate business owners to sell it. Even in states where hard liquor is regulated, such as my state of Virginia, you don't find a black market for booze, mostly because you can travel to a state that has better liquor stores.
In effect, because of the War on Drugs, we are destroying Mexico and forcing them to fight a war they are losing. As a result, their country is poorer than it could be, more corrupt than it should be, and people are so desperate to leave they are violating our national sovereignty in order to get away from the madness. Yes, that's right: illegal immigration would not be as big of a problem if there were no war on drugs.
In our mainstream debate chambers in Congress, on television, and on the radio, we always parse out these issues into separate categories, pigeonholing people based on these categories, and then start the name calling. We find ourselves proud of our labels and would rather die than see them taken away from us. And yet people all over the world are dying because of our careless attempts at classification and our good intentions. If you want your children to stay away from drugs then you shouldn't be such a bastard to them all the time.
As a software developer, it is easy for me to trace down the problems in the products I create. There's this thing call a stack trace, where the execution path taken by the program is laid out for me. But that doesn't mean that the execution path will always take the path I predict. The more complex a software system is, the more complex the path becomes. The world is a very complex system of living beings taking actions that will affect all other beings. Combine that with the fact that at least 6 billion of those living beings have a high level of intelligence and can act independent of their own instincts, and you end up with something that is impossible for a single human mind to comprehend. We are a part of the system, whether we like it or not.
So I view it as the ultimate form of arrogance for anyone to attempt to direct humanity on a specific path, gently or otherwise, because there is no point. Not only do you end up with unintended consequences, you also get a lot of resentful people. Yet, for some reason, many central planners find it necessary to become gods of this world with the rest of us peons under their feet. I still don't know why exactly human beings feel the need to appoint people to lead them. I often wonder if leadership is really just an excuse to not make the hard decisions on your own.
While is impossible to completely predict the outcome of certain actions, especially those that are designed to benefit all of us, it is certainly easy to make a good guess. The pattern of government solutions usually goes as follows:
- People complain about a problem. The problem doesn't have to be real, just perceived.
- The leaders, having been anointed by the people, decide to resolve the problem, otherwise they may find themselves out of work. So they design a solution to the problem
- The solution that was implemented by the leaders causes another, unforeseen problem.
- The new problem is addressed by the leaders with another solution. This cycle repeats itself perpetually until enough people realize that their leaders are full of crap. Unfortunately, instead of facing the problems head on, they usually appoint new leaders to deal with the current crop of problems. And so, the cycle never ends.
Maybe the solution is for the individual to deal with the problems in the first place. Perhaps the solution is not to look to our leaders, but to look to ourselves and ask, "What can I do in my life that will make things right?" Many of these things are not necessarily desirable, which is why we anointed leaders over us in the first place. But by facing these issues head on, we can find ourselves in positions that make us sovereign over ourselves, free from external forces that seek to direct our actions for their own benefit.
All it really takes is a little courage and a lot of perseverance. Only then will you be able to break out of the pattern of human idiocy and deal with others on an even plane.