An Entirely Unpredictable Outcome
Sometimes--more often than we would care to acknowledge--Western politicians prove themselves to be dumber than a sack of hammers. We are left shaking our heads at the monumental foolishness of our leaders. There has been one such example recently in Northern Ireland.
A green energy scandal that is saw people heating empty buildings just to collect government grants could cost British taxpayers more than £1 billion. The UK Treasury faces a huge bill after spending on Northern Ireland’s Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) went out of control, with businesses installing otherwise useless biomass heaters just to profit from the scheme. [Nick Hallett, Breitbart News]In basic macro-economics a universal axiom is that what you pay for, you are likely to get more of. When governments offer subsidies in the attempt to steer an electorate into a certain course of action--otherwise known as the Great Bribe--the end result is a bull market in the particular commodity or practice supposedly being expunged. Human beings have a notorious tendency to maximise their utility. If the government offers ("free") money, let's have it big time.
None of this is rocket science. Human beings are self-interested, and if some idiotic government is willing to pay a bounty on dead snakes, the unintended consequence is likely to be an explosion of the snake population. Consumers and economic "actors" will maximise their utility by rearing and raising snakes to get the bounty. Such motivation and human action rarely are factored in to the social equation by reckless politicians. And so it has happened in Northern Ireland.
