Abolish the Plea Deal

The government may never understand the principle which their own behavior so amply demonstrates: That incentives for abuse will create abuse. 

By Dan Gelernter 

 

Compare our government today to our government a couple of hundred years ago, and you might conclude that its growth was the inevitable result of the growth of the nation. But that can only be partly true: There are 60 times as many Americans today as at the turn of the 19th century, but the federal government employs closer to 600 times as many people. Somewhere, this explanation is off by an order of magnitude.

The extra growth is the result of how government operates: Government creates a new law. The law creates unintended consequences. Rather than repeal the law, the government creates another new law to deal with the unintended consequences. New laws create their own unintended consequences, and so forth. And voila: Exponential growth of the law, and of the law’s administrators. We are governed by the law of unintended consequences.

Perhaps the most dramatic example, the pernicious effects of which shape our nation to this day, is Prohibition. The problem: American workingmen were drinking away their salaries, and as a result were abusing and impoverishing their families. A thoughtful approach would have encouraged the creation of local clubs and other saloon alternatives. Instead, influenced chiefly by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the government had the brilliant inspiration that drinking would go away if alcohol did. The solution: Ban alcohol. .........To Read More....