History is replete with the failures of those who have attempted to use the power of government to accomplish their goals. Some of them just wanted to do good. Others considered themselves to be more enlightened. Still others were interested in domination, control, or conquest.
The failures of lesser men, when entrusted with or who accumulate power, are strikingly evident. But even principled, intelligent leaders become corrupt, wielding coercive government with devastating results. That is why the Founders wisely crafted a limited government.
But our government has become nearly unlimited. Central planners want to impose their vision of society. They love government because it’s useful to implement their progressive utopia. Humming “Give Peace a Chance” to themselves, they view government as the means to achieve a social paradise where no one suffers, no one lacks, and social justice prevails.
However, society is too complex for interventionist planners. Freedom is too deeply ingrained in the human psyche. They might try to manipulate just a few variables, but the unexpected results are manifold. Society is dynamic. It shifts around government obstacles with results that always look quite different than what the planners expected. Despite the mayhem they routinely cause, they remain blindly persuaded of their ability to steer outcomes.
Our own city commissioners were apparently looking to further their own social utopia right here. Riding high on a government-on-steroids-induced economic upturn (which of course could never, ever end), commissioners passed an ill-considered law requiring developers to build affordable housing. Armed with good intentions, they decided to force developers to serve their social vision.
In essence, they attempted to make things better for some by making it worse for others. Cleverly, no tax increase was necessary to implement this little social engineering experiment. All that was needed was a law that coerced private parties to fund and implement their feel-good policy.
Yes, they were shocked when the economy tanked. “No one foresaw the economy falling off a cliff,” Commissioner Chris Mehl said. Of course not. Their assumptions are based on Keynesian economics and static equations. But somehow it was still “…a worthwhile endeavor and not all worthwhile endeavors work out,” according to Commissioner Carson Taylor. Oh, of course. There is no failure when there are good intentions.
Taylor continued, “We want people essential to our economy — police officers, teachers and other people who work in schools, city government employees — we want them to live in the city and have a path toward homeownership because it binds them to the community and they have an affinity for it.” Let's note for the record that the people who are essential to our economy are all government employees.
But beyond that, I wonder if Taylor sees the irony that many more Bozemanites are now “bound to the community?” A lot of us own what is now “affordable” housing. The commissioners’ intent was achieved, albeit not in the way they expected. Interestingly, the federal government, responsible for this economic devastation via its meddling with the economy, foiled our local government's intervention into the economy.
Amazingly, the commissioners acknowledged their folly and repealed the law. Good for them that they recognized that things weren’t working. That is unusual in government, where programs are like vampires – impossible to kill while sucking the life out of the innocent.
But rather than realizing that government interventions cause more problems than they solve, apparently what we need is the same thing, except worse: “Bozeman needs a more flexible approach to workforce housing that’s not hamstringed (sic) by the market,” Planning Director Tim McHarg said. What? He wants an affordable housing program that functions apart from market forces? How exactly would he know that housing was in fact affordable unless he looked at the market?
One could only hope that big government types would learn to not keep trying the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. But these kinds of people do not easily give up their power or their faith in government. They need to be retired.
