Consequences, Intended and Not

Consequences, Intended and Not

Planning is usually a prudent thing to do and, usually, the planning pans out. Sometimes, though, especially when the planning is done by politicians, unintended consequences of misbegotten schemes make you wonder where the pols’ heads are.

Communist regimes are big on planning. Five Year Plans to re-vamp its economy were always a big favorite with the old U.S.S.R. commissars and always resulted in big failures.

One of the few sad remnants of Communism, North Korea, also has little luck when it comes to economics although it is spectacular in staging funerals. The recent obsequies for its late dictator Kim Jong-il were no exception.

North Korea demonstrated its expertise in not only planning its Supreme Leader’s funeral but in its consequences for hapless North Koreans who didn’t cry enough.

As an informant reported, within days of Kim Jong-il’s death, “The authorities are handing down at least six months in a labour-training camp to anybody who didn’t participate in the organised gatherings during the mourning period, or who did participate but didn’t cry and didn’t seem genuine.”

So much for Communism, so much for the dictatorship of the proletariat where the proles are forced to grieve for a bloody tyrant.

More relevant to Americans are interesting intended and unintended consequences in the U.S.

Last month, the FBI released a report indicating that violent crime in the U.S. fell 6.4 percent in the first half of 2011 and property crimes fell by 3.7 as contrasted with the same time 2010 time period.

That was the unexpected good news.

The bad news–for liberals who seek to disarm law-abiding citizens–is that the increasing number of armed law-abiding citizens in the country no doubt accounted in large part for the drop in crime.

As proven in Florida and elsewhere, criminals are far less inclined to maim, murder, and break into homes and businesses when their prospective victims are prepared to blow them away.

The intent of gun laws is to inhibit the unrestricted ownership of guns, the true consequence of which is to concentrate guns in the hands of criminals while denying honest Americans the right to defend themselves. The joke on liberals is that the latter stocking up on weapons to defend themselves serves as a deterrent against the former.

In a related issue, a presumed unintended consequence of excessive liberality has led to excessive violence.

A federal court judge decided last year that allegedly non-violent California prisoners were uncomfortable in their crowded facilities. He didn’t comment on the discomfort felt by their victims but did order California to give more space to the perpetrators. Strapped California had no money to build more prisons and chose instead to release thousands of convicted and accused “non-violent” offenders into society.

According to La Puente Mayor John Solis, his city and others are suffering the consequences of the judge’s beneficence. Solis reports that ”Sexual assaults are up about 300 percent and assaults with guns and knives up nearly 150 percent citywide” since the release of the reprobates.

He blames “prison realignment,” a euphemism for loosing barbarians in a state where gun laws are strictly enforced and a resultant explosion of barbarity.
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=12104.)