There is nothing worse than thinking of a great comeback after a conversation is over. Like a gluttonous George Costanza after being told, “The ocean called. They’re running out of shrimp,” you obsess over the comeback, kicking yourself for not thinking of it sooner.
This summer, I had a conversation with a very nice Evanston Republican about why I am voting for John Kerry. The conversation ranged from domestic issues to the war in Iraq.
The nice Republican man attacked traditional Democratic programs such as welfare and Medicare with the traditional Republican response of unintended consequences: “It’s nice that you want to help out poor people,” he said, “But these programs create incentives that create waste and leave people mired in poverty.”
As an economics major, I am very familiar with this argument. I know that we can’t just throw money at a problem and hope that our good intentions make everything OK. We have to pay close attention to the incentives our social programs create and think about what the consequences might be. But I’m sick of hearing it as an excuse not to do what we can to help people in need.
I didn’t have a good response at the time. I’ve got a comeback now.
Conservatives in America love to talk about unintended consequences when it comes to domestic policy, but they willfully ignore them in their foreign policy.
Think about the war in Iraq. It was intended to prevent terrorist attacks and spread democracy in the Middle East, both truly noble goals. But how likely is that outcome? In the rush to the war in Iraq, we didn’t hear anything about what the unintended consequences might be. All we heard is that we will be greeted as liberators, showered with flowers. Instead we already have seen the consequences of war in Iraq.
Terrorists have spilled through the porous borders of Iraq. If there ever were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they could easily be in the hands of terrorists now. We completely underestimated the level of resistance from various factions in Iraq. And we have given other rogue nations an incentive to speed up their nuclear programs, since the U.S. has shown it won’t invade a nation with nuclear weapons.
To think that we could predict what a war in Iraq would do the Middle East was incredibly arrogant and na
