Unintended Perverse Outcomes

Good Intentions are Necessary, but Not Sufficient

President Ronald Reagan once quipped that the most terrifying words in the English language were, “We are from the government and we are here to help.” When the State arrogates functions and powers to itself beyond the responsibilities delegated to it by the Lord Jesus Christ, the results (whether in the short or long term) are perverse. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that the actual outcome of illicit government programmes is usually the opposite of their intent. It is a living axiom: you don't mess with, nor disregard the Lord. You either build and develop society according to His directions and commands, or you suffer the consequences.

Here are just a few examples of perverse outcomes due to arrogant and illicit State imperialism in New Zealand:

1. Removal of the citizens' responsibilities for, and right to, self-defence and citizens' arrest as the first line of defence against crime, and reserving these powers for a state police force, has resulted in an increase in widespread petty crime, leading to increased lawlessness, and eventually a rising tide of serious crime due to an emergence of a criminal class. Result: suppressing citizens rights in order to fight crime more effectively results in the unintended outcome of more and more crime, with a rising inability of the police to cope.

2. Establishing a state education system in an effort to free compulsory and secular education to all children has resulted in falling educational standards, lower outcomes, growing illiteracy, higher education costs—that is, less education. State imperialism in education has proved to be a massive fraud, resulting in the unintended perverse outcome of growing ignorance and a permanent un-educated underclass.

3. The social welfare system, another enormous and illicit State programme, removes from people the responsibility and duty to provide for themselves and their dependants. The unintended perverse outcome is that State imperialism, in its illicit attempt to redistribute wealth and prevent poverty, has produced a permanent growing underclass enslaved to welfare handouts that is now into its fourth generation, and new families are joining every year.

4. State imperialistic moves to provide for solo-mothers, creating the Domestic Purposes Benefit, have produced an unintended perverse outcome of burgeoning numbers of solo mothers, and of children born to solo mothers. Since the State pays higher benefits according to the number of dependent children, solo mothers are incentivised to have more and more children to multiple sexual partners so that they can increase their income, and buy new wide screen TV's. The outcome—a rapidly escalating population of solo-mothers, and wayward children, all growing up to follow the example of their biological parents.

5. Every supplementary rule, regulation, or bureaucratic intervention to prop up a failing policy, ends up creating a new set of unintended perverse outcomes, usually requiring more regulation, leading to yet another round of yet more perverse outcomes. Consider for example the moves to counter the serial monogamy of men and to force biological fathers who have abandoned their children to contribute to the support of their “whelps” through more strict applications of the law. The unintended perverse result: more fathers moving offshore to escape the dragnet, indirectly lowering the average living standard for all who remain.

6. We have commented often on the perverse outcome of State imperialism with respect to bio-fuels. The unintended perverse outcome is millions more poor and vulnerable people starving and dying—to the point where bio-fuels are now being called a crime against humanity.

We at Contra Celsum are not libertarians. We believe that the State is a divinely instituted, holy, and spiritual institution. It is a true minister of God. But its powers, functions, competencies and responsibilities are extremely focused and very limited. It has a very clearly defined sphere of competence given to it by the Lord's appointment. As soon as the State (and, by extension, the community that endorses its actions) thinks itself wiser than God and steps outside those bounds, it lifts up its high hand against its Lord. By definition, it thereby becomes involved in illicit imperialistic behaviour. The outcome is never salutary. It is always perverse.

New Zealand is one of the more spiritually deadened countries in the modern world. Its hardness to the Gospel is legend. We believe that one of the prime causes of this arrogant spiritual blindness is that from its inception as a modern nation New Zealand the people not only accepted, but demanded, an imperial State.

The reasons are not hard to find. Firstly, European migration commenced at a time when the world-view Enlightenment was making significant inroads into the collective mind of the United Kingdom and Europe. The promise offered by the post-Christian Enlightenment was that nature and society could be known and ruled by rationalistically discovering the “laws of nature” and applying them in systematic "scientific" fashion.

New Zealand was a “virgin” society—a vacuum—so it presented the opportunity to grow a society from the beginning, starting with a blank slate. It was inevitable that such a society would be centrally and bureaucratically planned to a significant degree. Looking to the State as the central planning institution and the key source of capital was likewise inevitable. So, in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, New Zealand was given the appellation: “the social science workshop of the world”. A new rationalistic science was being applied to man, which meant that a central planning facility was required. An imperialistic State was an inevitable outcome.

Secondly, immigrants to New Zealand came to make a new life for themselves where they wanted to surpass the standards of living they experienced in the Old World. But economic development takes capital as well as labour. There was little or no infrastructure or capital to build it. The immigrants had cut themselves off from capital that had been built up through generations in Europe. Requiring what amounted to instant economic gratification, people looked to the State as the source for capital and resources.

The outcome has been a hugely expanded role for central imperialistic government. Such is the statist consensus in New Zealand—a consensus which historian Michael Bassett has called, “socialism without doctrines”—a consensus so deeply ingrained that even the political right can only think in terms of continually and consistently expanding state power. The exceptions have been rare indeed. Most of the vast expansions of State power and bureaucracy in New Zealand have occurred under the aegis of “right wing” or “conservative” governments, and as a direct and indirect result of their policies.

If one reflects on some of the most intrusive, imperialistic State institutions—all with prodigiously perverse outcomes—most have come from policies or actions taken by so-called conservative governments. We cite illustratively (but far from exhaustively) the Resource Management Act (ostensibly intended to promote development, but perversely doing more to impede economic growth than almost any other single piece of legislation); the Children Youth and Family Services bureaucracy (which has done more than any other single governmental institution to tear families apart and undermine parenting in this country); the Health and Safety in Employment Act and its attendant OSH bureaucracy (which has almost singlehandedly squeezed the economic life out of the small business sector with it endless safety manuals, audits, compliance regimes, and related regulatory paraphernalia); and last, but not least, the monumentally stupid Kyoto Protocol. This piece of bureaucratic fantasia was signed up to by a conservative government, and we were one of the few, if not the only, country to include agriculture in our Kyoto commitments.

New Zealand society accepts these intrusive State imperialistic expansions without demurring or question. It is part of what it means to live in this country. But the perverse outcomes just keep mounting. Moreover, the means of change are not at hand. Once a modern democracy has accepted an imperialistic role for the State there is only one way it can go—more and more of the same--as the perverse outcomes mount. It cannot be changed without rejecting the world-view which spawned it in the first place—the humanistic idolatry of the Enlightenment. And that is not going to change any time soon.

More perverse consequences, anyone? At present it is the only offering on the menu. But He Who is enthroned in the heavens is not mocked. He will force us to us eat our own cooking until it becomes utterly loathsome to us, and we vomit it back.

Then, and only then, may we be ready to listen to what the Lord has to say.