Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes: New at Reason

Government programs that don’t work as intended ought to be cut.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

If we judged everything by intentions rather than results, the world would be a strange place indeed. Steve never calls his mother on her birthday, but he always means to, so isn’t he a wonderful son?

That goes for government as well: If we judged laws only according to what their sponsors intended, then every law and every program that has ever been enacted has been an unqualified success. After all, nobody intends for things to go wrong—right?

And yet things do go wrong. The news is full of examples.

Take civil asset forfeiture, one particularly dubious form of which Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reviving. The intention behind civil asset forfeiture—a practice in which the government seizes the property of suspected criminals—is brilliant: Confiscate the ill-gotten gains, auction them off, and then use the proceeds to finance investments in law enforcement. Using criminals’ own resources against them: It’s law enforcement jiu-jitsu!

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