On the "Law of Unintended Consequences"

The Law of Unintended Consequences is a supposed law governing human action. It states that, uh, changes in a complex system inevitably will have unintended consequences. Which is true, for what it's worth, and certainly includes human institutions. It's very similar to the humorous Murphy's Law ("everything that can go wrong, will") but unlike Murphy's Law, it's kinda sorta treated extremely seriously by conservatives as a real and important facet of reality that continually needs to be reckoned with. These people believe that, if properly understood, the law tends to support their conservative worldview and beliefs.

Now, I wouldn't bother writing this if I thought this Law of Unintended Consequences were merely a cutesy truism that people curmudgeonly wielded in political discussions and business meetings as a form of small talk or informal argument, a kind of signal of maturity from the grandparent to the child, from the expert to the novice, from the teacher to the student. Instead, the Law of Unintended Consequences functions as a skeleton key into a whole continuum of ideological beliefs professed by all manner of conservatives, libertarians, paleoconservatives, and classical liberals (which for this essay I will simply shorthand as "conservatives"). And yet, for such a supposedly important belief, they (almost without exception) apply this belief in such a slipshod, irrational, and self-serving way that it undermines not only the validity of their beloved Law itself, but also serves to undermine the entire premise that conservatives as a group have any exclusive claim on any moral, logical, or social wisdom. In other words, it's a singularly clear window into the basic illegitimacy of the "facts and logic" right, a singularly clear window that, properly observed, constitutes a singularly powerful reason for a reasonable person to desert the right in the United States. I hope that, by working through several examples, I can show you what I mean.

First, you should know that the Law of Unintended Consequences, as a general rule, is basically only applied to government actions to restrict corporations. There are exceptions of course, but they are exceptions that prove the rule in the breach. 

This selective application of a supposed Law, if it is sincere and not disingenuous, is almost absurdly illogical and ingenuous on its face.

Let's start with the fact that these Unintended Consequences are always implied or explicitly-stated to be negative. I probably don't need to elaborate on why this is absurd, but very quickly: Whether in business, government, or daily life, it's obvious that solving one problem very often leads unintentionally to solving whole classes of other problems, and it's equally obvious that this is not exclusive to private actions. Two of the bases for modern public health and statistics involved a couple of beleaguered individuals trying to solve two extremely specific problems: a) tracing a cholera epidemic in one city to waste in the water supply and b) trying to rationally manage frontline hospitals in the Crimean War. Billions of people have had better lives because someone said that a few military hospitals in Central Asia should be run better and someone else wondered what the source of an local epidemic was. Does any of this miraculous discovery count in the favor of Unintended Consequences? If not, why not? If so, then why is a government attempting to solve a problem necessarily a bad thing? Why would you bring such a principle up, as if government, prudently following a Law, should err on the side of inaction in general, when some of its unintended consequences have fundamentally and objectively transformed society for the better? Everyone who would have died of cholera or sepsis in the last century and a half should be deeply skeptical of the deployment of a principle that treats secondary benefits and costs as somehow inherently suspicious.

My point isn't that the Law of Unintended Consequences is necessarily wrong as a principle or as a heuristic. No; it's worse. Worse, because it's a deeply-meaningless prescription masquerading as a principle and an inconsistent thought masquerading as a heuristic. To mix metaphors, it's a bottomless abyss of shifting quicksand that drowns any careful analysis of human action in favor of a meretricious feeling of consistency and even wisdom about big government that conservatives are said to singularly possess. And yet, even on the basic question of whether those unintended consequences might sometimes be good, the conservative has no answer, revealing their supposed Law of Nature to be little more than a lazy bit of rhetoric.

Lest you think this is a cherry-picked, boutique little contradiction that I'm disingenuously promoting as if it's the Holy Grail of Modern Conservative Thought, let's get serious and engage with the Law on its primary domain, in its primary application in terms of recommending government inaction as opposed to action. I think that's fair.

Well, here's an example from real life: Companies backed by venture capitalists like Uber and Lyft will enter a city's market with the literal and explicitly-stated goal of disrupting an industry. The business model is explicitly to disrupt the city's transportation sector. If that is not in fact the business model, then countless investors into these ventures have been defrauded. If "unintended consequences" means anything, it positively must apply to this situation! How could it not? An external market entrant uses external funding with the intention of changing how countless local economies work on the deepest levels: jobs, wages, infrastructure, environmental regulations. But conservatives will very rarely apply the Law of Unintended Consequences to any of these situations where that Law would obviously apply if it were real: I'm talking about new technologies, new industries, newly-created markets, new market entrants, or anything else that emerges as a new phenomenon from corporations pursuing self-interest. If the Law does not apply here, where else would it possibly apply? If it does not apply here, why on earth would you call it a Law? 

But, the Law simply never comes up when Uber and Lyft entered cities with the intent of disrupting industries with billions of VC funds. Perhaps it never crossed anyone's mind. However, here's the rub: if a state, local, or federal government ever tries to regulate Uber and Lyft, suddenly the Law of Unintended Consequences becomes the fundamental mechanism by which we are all governed: as real, as irresistible, and as powerful as gravity. Suddenly conservatives can't stop talking about what might happen if such an onerous regulation were to be enacted. You're messing with forces you don't understand. That could affect jobs, wages, infrastructure, the environment. These are the most important parts of our society. How dare you meddle in the beautiful emergent order from disorder that constitutes an economy? Have you not heard the Greek tragedies about hubris? Pride goeth before the fall, my ignorant lib.

If a city's government tries to impose a smoking ban in restaurants for public health reasons, that ban is subject to the Law of Unintended Consequences. But, if I have a billion dollars and want to disrupt the same city's restaurant industry by attempting to mimic and undercut every major restaurant in town, then I'm not subject to the Law. That is, unless the city had already imposed the smoking ban and I'm trying to come in and take advantage of a fortuitous loophole in the language of the law that technically allows smoking only for restaurants that I buy. Then, for all intents and purposes, I'm the Law itself, dispassionately acting on the Law's behalf and imposing its will! However, if the city's restaurant owners were to collectively get together at an industry convention and decide to voluntarily impose a smoking ban for their own sake, then that isn't subject to the Law at all. Unless they're only doing it because they want to get ahead of what they believe to be the likelihood of the city imposing a smoking ban. Then the government is involved again, so therefore the industry group is not only subject to the Law but acting as the arbiter and enforcer of the immutable Law of Unintended Consequences.

I realize the above example is confusing. But that's the point. The Law of Unintended Consequences comes and goes as it becomes convenient for conservatives to make whatever point they want to make. It's pure rhetoric that naturally falls apart when it is analyzed from beginning to end. So, seriously: The Law of Unintended Consequences basically only comes up when we're talking about government intervention. And so it cannot be a Law. we have that the Law is either real but selectively-applied (in which case, why should we listen to only its selective application?) or altogether unreal (in which case, who cares how it's applied?) 

It's true that conservatives don't always apply the Law to governments and never to corporations. However, when conservatives do breach this nearly-universal generalization, it's typically only to blame the government in a slightly more sophisticated way. Ex: "The government caused the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008 (and the ensuing global financial crisis) by effectively requiring businesses to lend to subprime lenders." 

And that brings us to the equally-fraught question of agency. Because, whether or not the above paraphrase is a fair description of the causes of the mortgage crisis and the Global Financial Crisis (it's not, but that's for another time), it's a bizarre theory to say "So then the government was primarily responsible -- the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again!" After all, presumably lending institutions like Wells Fargo weren't absolutely hidebound to one specific do-goody regulation about lending requirements, because they shamelessly and maliciously broke many other laws, like the ones against fraud. The idea that one single well-meaning regulation caused global financial collapse is, yes, a just-so story that conveniently places blame onto the one possible cause that isn't rooted in rampant private financial greed,. But it's also a deep moral rationalization that is deeply ethically blinkered in a way that conservatives pride themselves on supposedly avoiding in other contexts.

You see, if a government attempts to impose what we (regardless of our beliefs) might consider to be a reasonably-intended law, and a corporation flouts that, the conservative tendency to blame only the government action and not the corporate reaction is illogical on its face.

In morality, it takes two to tango, as most conservatives will happily concede when it comes to individual actions. Banning shoplifting is important, yes, but most conservatives will agree that it's arguably more important that individuals, by and large, have the basic moral fabric not to shoplift in the first place. After all, most will agree that the law doesn't necessarily create morality, and morality is the basis for collective trust on which society is built at the end of the day. 

However, this same moral understanding fails them when attempting to deal with government. When a corporation flouts a reasonable proscription on its actions (and let's be clear that very often a corporation is owned by a sole proprietor, a small group of individual owners, or a single extremely wealthy individual with a majority stake), all these careful considerations about individual and collective morality go out the window: The Law of Unintended Consequences kinda sorta lets them all off the hook, and actually kinda sorta instead blames people for organizing to impose reasonable moral rules on their economy, because "you didn't consider that people would find a way around that" and "you didn't consider that maybe your attempt to fix it would make it even worse". Wise words from the eternal backseat drivers. But where is their scorn for a small group of people simply and selfishly deciding to deliberately undermine the will of an entire society? "They needed to do it to satisfy their shareholders." Or what? Or they'd be fired? Is their job so precious, their shareholders so important, that they can decide by fiat to find a loophole in enactment or in enforcement to completely nullify the will of the majority? We need to treat the idea of "technically legal greed and exploitation" the same way we treat "cleverly getting away with shoplifting".

The only reason these bizarre distinctions and special pleadings and selective appeals to morality that instantly fall apart upon a glance is remotely workable as an ideology on any level is because of that careful distinction made between "economy" and "culture" that somehow excises moral responsibility for individuals acting in the former while strictly imposing moral responsibility on the latter (whether through law, custom, or blame). The idea that "rational" people do moral crimes does not excuse those crimes in any other context, of course. We don't look at a murderer and think, "Well, you were just doing what society told you to, and besides, killing that landlady was actually rational for you." That's an extreme, strawman version of liberal and leftist beliefs that all but the very staunchest of prison abolitionists don't really accept. (And even this person of straw, were they to exist somewhere, would almost certainly not defend the murder but question [perhaps to an absurd extent] the carceral and punitive response to a perhaps-avoidable tragedy.) However, if a corporation on the other hand releases a new type of chemical into its products, the air, or water that it knows from internal research to be harmful and may cause the deaths of thousands of people, this isn't thousands of times more evil, necessarily. The corporation could simply be reacting to a new EPA regulation that bans the use of a different, more well-studied chemical. They're simply acting rationally on the Law of Unintended Consequences. They have shareholders to placate, and quarterly reports to publish. People work for that company, you know?

Of course I'm not saying conservatives would defend the corporation here or are fine with corporations murdering people (at least not necessarily and not in this context). In fact, they would probably make the reasonable response (even if I personally find it inadequate) that various individuals within the corporation should be prosecuted and that class-action lawsuits be filed by affected victims to the tune of billions of dollars. I'm not at all saying conservatives are inherently unreasonable people, nor that they are individually incapable of ethically dealing with the problem of corporate wrongdoing. But I am saying that their treatment of actions by corporations, individuals, and governments is so wildly inconsistent that it undermines their claims to be rational thinkers, at least within the context of their stated ideology. No one on the facts-and-logic right says "Wow, deregulating EPA regulations or removing workplace safety requirements might cause some unintended consequences down the road!" A cynical read might be that this doesn't happen because we know precisely what the intent of such actions will be, and we have a pretty good idea what the consequences will be. But a more generous read is that conservatives perform an consistently inconsistent form of mental double-entry bookkeeping where market actors, government actors, and individuals all have wildly different moral standards applied to them, and this inconsistency/discrepancy, which may be defensible on its own terms, is then absurdly posited as a Law of Nature.

Of course, on this last point, a conservative might respond, "I'm a conservative precisely because I believe the respective situations with corporations and governments to be different, namely that government actions are enforced by explicit coercion and corporate actions are not (unless with the participation of the government). It's not inconsistent if I have an empirical belief and carefully incorporate that empirical belief into my ideology. I apply the Law of Unintended Consequences because it works."

Which would all be fine and good if true. But my point isn't just that the application isn't inconsistent  -- my point is that the application of the Law of Unintended Consequences is irreconcilably and irredeemably inconsistent either to the point of total paradox and total absurdity or to the point of total triviality and inconsequentiality. The Law, in the hands of these masters of logic, devolves either to flat contradiction or to an infinitesimally-thin ex post facto tautology.

After all, if a government's action can cause unintentional consequences (always negative) but that same government's inaction, on the same matter, in the same breath, somehow cannot cause such consequences? Then we're not even dealing in morality -- we're dealing in divination! We're dealing with the invocation of government (and all the attendant rhetorical tropes such as "force", "coercion", and "Freaking Orwell was right, he just got the year wrong!") as a magical or theological spell, the casting of which, violating of the natural laws of the economy, must inevitably bring bad harvests. 

If I thought this was only about the Law of Unintended Consequences, a relatively-arbitrary bit of a much larger picture, I wouldn't have bothered to write this. No, I wrote this because I think this is about the basic logical shortcomings and rhetorical compensations endemic to all conservative thought in the United States. Because I'm talking about the smart ones here. In fact, I'm trying to talk to the smart ones here. If you have such a valuable ideology with such inherently valuable ideas about human nature, it shouldn't be trivially easy to pick apart a core stated principle simply by looking at it. If you have any intellectual integrity, you should either abandon such deeply inconsistent or fundamentally empty principles or else rewrite them so that they are actually consistent, useful, and wise for the governance of a society. One reason I finally abandoned all forms of conservatism several years ago is when I found that the vast majority of people who purged themselves of preconceptions in this way eventually just stopped being conservative.

I will happily concede that many conservative individuals often possess this empirical wisdom in their own lives and personal domains. But I maintain that this wisdom is for unrelated and tangentially-related reasons (hard work, respect for elders and posterity, and moral dignity can go a long way in character-building). With that said, I actually find the reasonable conservative very impressive considering that they're fighting through a self-imposed handicap of an ideology which does not aid this wisdom in the slightest, but in fact hinders them at every turn by providing the worst possible "governing framework" for a worldview: One that is paternalistic, condescending, inconsistent, unwise, and unempirical. The Law of Unintended Consequences, while superficially a fount of wisdom to the thinking person on the right, in fact acts as both an extremely lazy heuristic and an extremely active sycophant, parasitically endearing itself to the erstwhile-thinking person by flattering them into not thinking. The Law of Unintended Consequences is one of many conservative ideas that, speaking charitably, has had the unintended consequence of delegitimizing their whole project.

Which, to be clear, is a good thing, here speaking personally as a person on the left. But it might be a far better social equilibrium if thinking people of supposed judgment and taste on the right simply would stop incapacitating their own reason with the ether of an intellectually-undead ideology and began to help those of us on the left to build a kinder, fairer, more equal, and more prosperous world. Right now, these people of supposed conscience have had that conscience hobbled and maimed by, most charitably, a big cluster of well-nursed grievances, unexamined assumptions, and unreflective just-so stories that pass for thoughts.

The whole conservative ideal --to stand athwart history by reminding reformers of the barrenness of human nature and the fragility of institutions-- can seem a noble and appealing goal to someone of conscience. But the ideal too easily descends into thwarting humanity from ever improving, effectively proving their point of a faulty, tragic human nature by the precise extent to which they themselves endeavor to embody both those faults and the ensuing tragedy, spiting humanity's future to flatter their self-image of moral integrity. I can think of little sadder.