“There is a tendency among regulators to act like Adam Smith’s “Man of System,” moving objects around on a chess board. The man of system … is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles … are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably. (Smith, 1759; pp. 233-234) The “game” may be hockey or public policy; the insight is the same. Unintended consequences may reduce, or even eliminate, the good you expect to result from a policy change. People aren’t chess pieces.”
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Michael Munger,
Is Capitalism Sustainable?
