In the past, I wrote an essay ("The Right People, The Wrong People and "Just Plain Folks"") examining the way that advocates of big government excuse its failing by claiming that any shortcomings were the results of the wrong people being in charge, that were the right people at the helm, big government would deliver on all its promises and inaugurate heaven on earth. What is interesting is that the right suffers from an inverse error. Where the advocates of big government seem to argue that only with good people can we get good results, the right (and, to be fair, the left) tend to imagine that only bad people can bring about bad results.("Life Without Villains", "Enemies Into Villains", "Rethinking My Earlier Position", "The Nature of Evil", "With Good Intentions", Paved With Good Intentions) We can see it every day in the people scouring Obama's associates and history for explicit socialists, in those who seek out secret conspiracies or sinister motives for every action.("Conspiracy Theory Enters the Mainstream", "Can Hawaiians Travel Overseas?", "Maybe Obama Was Born in Gulf Breeze, Florida", "Katrina and BP") Nor is it limited to the conspiracy theorists. Even the political mainstream tends to look at every explanation as a mere pretext and seeks behind every action for its "true" motive. ("Deadly Cynicism", "Self-Serving Cynicism and Our Cultural Immaturity", "The Presumption of Dishonesty") In part this is a sign of our times, as we simply presume dishonesty in everyone we meet, especially in politics, but that is not the whole explanation. There is another element, that being the belief that bad things can only be brought about by bad people.

I would argue that that belief is as mistaken as the left's premise that only good people can bring about good results. As I showed in "Planning For Imperfection", "Greed Versus Evil", "Fairness and the Free Market" and "Greed and the Price of Oil", even the most base motives, driving the most self-absorbed people, given the correct environment, can produce results beneficial to society as a whole. More than that, the entire free market system is based on this premise. However, that is not my point today, it is simply a useful parallel to my real topic, the harm that can be done by those seeking to do good.

It is easy to see why this might be an unpopular position. As I described in "With Good Intentions", our culture in general has become fascinated with intentions, giving praise for well meaning failures more than successes. It is a short leap from praising or blaming solely upon intentions to deciding that results must be based upon intentions alone. Even those who do not emphasize intention to such a degree are unlikely to accept the truth, that intent can be completely irrelevant. After all, if a system rewards those who intend to do bad as well as those who do good, it offends our sense of justice, and so, though not consciously, we tend to reject systems which are indifferent to our motives.

Yet, whether we believe or not, the truth remains that some systems can produce good results even from bad intentions¹, and other systems can produce bad results, even from those with the best of intentions. It may seem unfair, it may be far less satisfying than looking for villains behind every mishap, but it is still true. The intentions of the actors are irrelevant, or at least far less relevant than the system under which they operate².

Let us look at a hypothetical situation, to better understand the mechanism by which this works, and through which even the most angelic beings can be driven to produce undesirable outcomes.

Let us assume you are in charge of a government office, charged with remedying some specific problem. Let us imagine, for our purposes, you are the official in charge of reducing unemployment. Obviously, having taken the job, you believe the government can remedy such a problem, and so you set about trying to fix whatever you can. Taking whatever authority you have been given, you start trying to help.

However, as with any job, in government or not, you find that the amount of help you can give is limited by the resources available to you. You can help, but only to a point. And so, in order to help more people, you lobby for more money, more power, a larger scope of action, anything that might help you carry out your job.

And that is the basic mechanism by which good intentions begin to create bad results. Those who believe the government can solve problems seek more power in order to provide more help, and as a consequence, not only does government power grow, but government consumption of resources grows, while simultaneously individual wealth and rights are reduced. All without a single villain in sight, just people doing what they think is right, with the best intentions in mind.

But the problems do not stop there. The quest to do good tends to press government growth in different directions. For example, in many cases the official will see private citizens who make bad choices, who make decisions he can clearly recognize as contributing to the problems he is trying to solve. And so, as part of his efforts to do good, he will begin to lobby the government to enact laws either preventing them from making those bad decisions, or encouraging or forcing them to make the right decisions.

And the growth continues whether the plans succeed or fail. If they succeed, then clearly more money and more power would allow even greater successes. But if they fail, is it not also likely that with a little more money and a little more authority they could have succeeded? And so, again, without any sinister intentions, we have the origins of the continual growth of government and erosion of private power.

Even seemingly corrupt practices, such as the undue influence exerted by lobbyists, can often be explained in part by innocent actions. For example, when a law is passed creating import quotas, how are such quotas to be set? The law is usually drafted to appease one constituency or another, but drafting the regulations to suit that one group alone seems remarkably unfair. And so regulators try to find a balance between interests, and, lacking any objective means to set quotas (as there are none -- see "The Inevitable Corruption of Protectionism"), they turn to the industries with an interest in the question, that means those with lobbyists. And so, with no other means to figure out a solution balanced between many groups, they use information provided by lobbyists to see who cares about the quotas, and how much.

Of course, not all actions are innocent, there are sinister motives and unsavory individuals. What I want to show here is how much can be explained by completely innocent decisions, without even a hint of a villain. And, more importantly, how the system of government itself determines what outcomes will take place, regardless of intentions. When we recall that, we can stop chasing after villains, and apply ourselves to the important reforms, reshaping the state and economy into a version which can withstand the actions if those with evil intentions.

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1. Clearly, certain bad intentions will produce bad results. If an individual is unwilling to operate within the law, or is willing to ignore his own self interest, then he can still cause harm, even under the best of systems. However, provided individuals behave rationally (by which I mean only acting in their own self-interest) the free market system will channel intentions, good and bad, into productive, positive results.

2. I discussed an analogous situation in my post "The Tragedy of the Creative Commons", where it was assumed that "competition" was a good thing, and would always produce beneficial results, while, in reality, competition is beneficial only to the degree the system in which competition takes place allows it to be beneficial. In the case of that essay, the small iterative changes made in collaborative projects, divorced from a means to measure their success, were quite different in results from the small changes that take place in a competitive marketplace, where consumer reaction gives a measure of success or failure.

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POSTSCRIPT

Some similar ideas can be found in "With Good Intentions", "In The Most Favorable Light", "Grow or Die, The Inevitable Expansion of Everything ", " "The Threat of Perfection ", "Utopianism and Disaster", "Greed Versus Evil", "In Praise of Contracts", "Recipe For Disaster", "The Endless Cycle of Intervention",  "The Cycle of Compassion", "The Inevitable Corruption of Protectionism " and "An End to War". Similar ideas are also discussed in "Two Paths", "The Triumph of Good" and "The Failure of Evil".

POSTSCRIPT II

Note, the intentions of office holders is not the only force driving government expansion. Citizens often demand the government "do something", even those who should know better. And so those who want to stay in office will do something, even if it is meaningless, to appease voters. Because, if they do not stay in office, how can they do the good they want to do? So even there, good intentions are at the root of government expansion, which, if not always the direct cause, certainly is a prerequisite of most government-caused harm. I discussed this topic previously in the posts ""How Conservatives Defeat Themselves", "Defending Freedom?", "Why We Lose", "Giving Away the Game", "The Single Greatest Weakness",  "What We Deserve", "What is Wrong with Us", "Pyrrhic Victories", "Who Is To Blame?", "Don't Blame the Politicians", "The Difficulty of Principle", "Damn the Torpedoes!", "You Lose When You Think You Win", "The Shortcomings of Pragmatism", "Pragmatism Revisited", "Pragmatism Revistied, Again", "Impractical Pragmatists", "The Problem of the Small Picture", "Arguing In Hindsight", "The Best Historical Example", "A Passing Thought", "Rethinking the Scopes Trial", "The Political Spectrum", "Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution", "Mistaken Perceptions of the Industrial Age" and "Right for the Wrong Reason".