Unintended Consequences
How human nature so readily fashions bad outcomes from good intentions
During the dark days of World War II a few British people were dreaming of a postwar period in which somehow the UK would not be shackled under Nazi or Soviet rule but would instead have some measure of control over its own destiny. Even as bombs rained down, this small group of dreamers wrote papers outlining their optimistic dreams. In November 1942 the economist William Beveridge published a book containing some of these dreams; it was called Social Insurance and Allied Services.
In the book was a vision in which the State would provide essential services for its most vulnerable citizens. The UK was not the first to consider such concepts; Bismark introduced a basic pension for all Germans in 1881 and Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives in the 1930s marked a new way of thinking about government’s responsibilities to its citizens. But arguably what became known as The Beveridge Report was the first attempt to provide a systematic framework for services a modern nation should try to provide. Unlike the babbling idiocy of Marxism (which, being an industrial-age religion, is merely a refashioning of Manichureanism under the guise of pseudo-economics) Beveridge’s ideas were feasible and rational.
