The Chimera of Control (2)

Since the last time I wrote about this subject, a few other examples occurred to me of things that seemed like a good idea at the time. Some were meant to stimulate, improve or increase:

• Better roads do not always lead to less traffic problems: people just move further from the city (because housing is cheaper), and allow traffic to increase to "intolerable" levels again;
• More efficient dishwashers might reduce the amount of manual work, but tend to increase the total amount of dishwashing done, because people will use more plates, cups, glasses, pans etc., knowing that it hardly costs any extra effort. (Personally, I think one dishwasher load a day for a family of four should be more than enough, but I suspect that the average is higher;
• Special subsidies for single parents (usually women) tend to increase the number of divorces (real or not), and create hordes of men who have lost their role as parent;
• Financial aid to corrupt developing countries often ends up in the pockets of those that do not need it, and who only make the situation for the poor worse;  
• Cheaper consumer products might sound like a good idea - nice for the consumer, and for the producer - but more consumption and more production also leads to more waste (and a wasteful attitude, especially when the price drops so much that it is cheaper to replace a broken or damaged product than repair it), which is usually bad news, either in general, or for other people (third world countries and/or your descendants).
• Cleaning up other people's messes (or solving their problems) might feel like you are giving the right example, but it also removes an important stimulus for them to (learn to) do it themselves. (The trick, of course, is to find the right balance between the two, and distinguish between situations where people really need your help, and situations where they need to brave it out themselves).

and others were supposed to repress, suppress, block, eradicate:

• Attempts to eradicate or at least reduce the number of certain organisms does not always work. Unless you succeed in killing them off entirely within a closed area (say a small island), hunting foxes and rabbits just means they have bigger litters, and "unnatural" selection through insecticides,  antibiotics and disinfecting everything only results in resistant strains. (I have yet to see conclusive evidence of this, but I suspect that overcleanliness makes  us weaker, because our immune system does not get enough "exercise". Our bodies were designed to fight germs, following the advice of many advertisements and desinfecting everything only shifts the problem. The only time this does make sense is when the risks of not doing are very high, such as in operating theaters.)
• Trying to suppress certain behavior (alcohol, prostitution, drugs, gambling, certain dangerous "sports") may make that behavior more interesting and/or desirable, both for potential users and for those that make a living out of selling these things. In a sense, this is the same idea the one expressed in the well-know U.S. gun lobby slogan "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns": if you ban alcohol, the trade goes underground (see the wiki article on Prohibition) and the very act of being illegal invites all kinds of other unwanted and/or criminal behavior (violence, extortion, bribery, corruption, etc.). As far as drugs are concerned, politicians might be reluctant to admit it, but police forces around the world are have known for a long time that you cannot "win the war" on drugs. Fighting an individual drug is like hunting foxes: the only way to win is to eradicate it completely in a closed environment. But once you do that, some other animal (=drug) will jump in to fill the vacuum you have just created.  Much better is to regulate trade, and - like germs in the operating theater - only try to suppress behavior that in itself presents a clear and immediate health risk to people other than the user. By this argument, and considering the high numbers of gun-related accidents and incidents, gun ownership should be much more heavily regulated than alcohol, drugs, or gambling.  And prostitution should be even more heavily regulated than gun ownership, because of the health risks and because making it illegal stimulates human trafficking. Of course, that leaves the issue of who picks up the bill for the damage that users (smokers, idiots who try to snowboard down the North Slope, etc.) do to themselves, but I will leave that for another entry. 
• Trying to prohibit copying is similar to the above (see also this entry), with the difference that the most important risks of allowing it are financial; I will save that for another entry as well.