Homelessness and Government

By Rational Db8

On April 21, 2021 Christopher F. Rufo posted this piece, The Shaky Foundations of L.A.’s Housing ‘Entitlement’ for the Homeless, exposing a number of truths.  First, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and most importantly, federal government programs are a rabbit hole of over runs, corruption and failure.  

That's the problem with so many large government programs. That's true regardless of which side puts forth the program, although it is far far more the case with those pushed by the left. The last programs are almost always far worse this way because  they  refuse  to look at possible unintended or even virtually guaranteed unintended consequences. They're more concerned with emotions, messaging, and convincing voters to accept their schemes, with the usual raise in taxes, than actually coming up with good functioning successful programs. 

It's one of the key reasons why socialism and centralized planning just does not work and utterly destroys nations. That and the fact that socialism and centralized planning totally ignores key facets of human nature and thus incentivizes and disincentivizes all the wrong things, all while trumpeting that such policies will result in utopian Pie in the Sky outcomes. Only then they never bothered to even go back and evaluate the outcomes, let alone adjust things accordingly.

Just look at the way welfare has utterly destroyed black culture, with over 70% of black children now born into single-parent homes thanks almost entirely to the way welfare is set up.  We are reaping the rewards of dismal educational outcomes, far worse crime, larger wealth gaps, etc etc etc. The inevitable results were very well prophesied by Senator Moynihan (D) in the Moynihan report, along with others at the time when the welfare bills were first being considered in Congress.

And of course, once a government program is established it's almost impossible to get rid of, especially large ones.

The ethanol subsidy is another example of a dismally failed expensive program that we've been stuck with ever since.

No Child Left Behind is another example. Decades after it was promulgated, they finally went back and evaluated the results only to find out that by 4th grade there were virtually no improvements for kids in No Child Left Behind versus no program. And yet billions and billions have been spent on it. And, of course, even though they discovered long ago that it was essentially worthless, it's still going strong.

And all too often as with the "guaranteed right to Housing" insanity, there was never a solid foundation for such a program to begin with.

Such things so often sound as if they ought to work, and sound extremely good and humane, unfortunately, far too often the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions just is not remotely enough for success at anything.  Let alone just wanting to sound good without ever bothering to do basic due diligence looking at the evidence that is available and considering possible unintended consequences. All of which is drastically compounded when such programs are implemented on a widespread basis rather than having small trial programs first, and then, after a suitable time period that is long enough to have meaning, thoroughly evaluating the results before even considering expanding the program.

Even then, once something is implemented there has to be reasonably time periodic evaluations of weather the program is actually meeting its intended goals or not. Adjustments have to be able to be made when problems are found, and the program has to be able to be scrapped if it isn't effective.

But eliminating programs run by the government is almost impossible because politicians are loathe to reduce funding to anything because of the inevitable loss of jobs and therefore loss of votes from any and all of those who are directly involved in it. 

 

No matter how failed or harmful the blasted program turns out to be.