Unintended Economic Consequences, Externalities & Narrow Self-Interest

I wanted to write something about unintended consequences and externalities of the pursuit of narrow self-interest in short range goals that sometimes occur. Governments, corporations and even individuals may generate vast and significant consequences unintentionally.

Slavery in the western hemisphere developed because of the narrow self-interest of producers desirous of cheap labor. The externality was the presence and transcendence of the African descendents of slavery in the Americas today-that's a good thing for heirs of Africa yet it is impossible to use that as an excuse for slavery. It is unlikely that Brits, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese thought that the western hemisphere should have tens of millions of Africans and so used slavery as an opportunity to relocate them.

Cheap labor from Latin America combined with descendents of slaves is also generating the unintended consequence of making American dependents of Europeans a minority. The wealthy seek after the short-term goal of profit without social concern.

The invasion of Europe by Muslim forces of the Ummayad dynasty brought a thousand year war with the west reducing development of Muslim civilization. The counter-productive Muslim effort to assert a planetary theocracy for the prophet of war in submission to Allah has generally reduced the quality of Muslim life and culture. Obama administration effort to be a prophet of homosexual marriage globally may change the Muslim role-unintended consequence.

President Obama is seeking a $10 an hour minimum wage. The unintended consequence would be an accelerated job loss to China. Chinese labor is far cheaper than U.S. labor and will be for some time. Speaker Boehner suggest job training for the unemployed and low wage workers yet it is far cheaper to train Chinese and Indians than Americans-and any jobs that pay well yet can be outsourced to China will be for the next twenty years.

Jobs that cannot be outsourced that are low-tech are filled by illegal aliens and first generation descendents of illegal aliens to a substantial extent. U-6 under-employed Americans are told to get good tech training yet because of the aforementioned reason of outsourcing good jobs and the fact that training is expensive and has no pay while training is going on in some sort of school that prospect is dubious. One can have tech college and academic college degrees and get no work. The there is also the racial and cultural thing-it is tough to get work in Hispanic majority areas if one isn't Hispanic.

Unintended consequences abound in U.S. foreign policy. The Syrian civil war brought more than a 100,000 casualties and the Obama administration supported it in order to remove Bashir Assad and create a democracy. Reasonable people knew that culturally a religious war in that area is a fight to the death and difficult to extinguish. It may be even more difficult to get those people to live together peaceably with a democratic environment. Not even the U.S. Congress is competent on non-partisan development of environmental conservation, full employment and zero illegal alien immigration.

Unintended consequences are presently disregarded in much economic planning. Planning in engineering is regarded as necessary yet in economics it is considered Utopian or illusory. In the age of fracture it is better regarded perhaps by the administration to be a doper driving a car like millions of others without interest in high-speed non-fossil fuel mass transit with local low-impact electronic shuttling through restored wilderness.

An unintended consequence of the contemporary economic practices is the destruction of ecospheric diversity and health. None really intend to destroy it or to create global warming yet they do individually and collectively. President Obama and some congressmen may not intend to harm the Russian and world economic or renew a cold war with Russia over the Ukraine conundrum yet they may. Russia has celebrated it's 1000^th anniversary of growing from Kievian Rus and the President is willing to stipulate that Russia has had some influence in the Ukraine...swell.

Queer behavior may be a right Americans have among themselves, yet it is questionable that queer behavior should reason special legal treatment or be allowed to usurp marriage between sexes as an institution for procreation. It is important to protect the civil rights of all Americans and for Americans to have privacy without social approbation for what they do that isn't illegal in private. It is reasonable to criticize the political codification of queer behavior with laws creating legal fictions for the public to submit to. The unintended consequences of building a queer behavior hegemony socially for the U.S.A. might be anticipated.

Probably there are unintended consequences of Obamacare besides those that have already occurred. It would have been better just to expand the V.A. and community homeless and poor persons clinics networks synthesizing them with synergistic help to serve the uninsured and broke. Obamacare let's the poor of 30 states go without medical or dental coverage. Probably the President didn't intend that.

When the corporate man takes his barbecue holiday to the dry rural forest on a windy weekend and enjoys the prime rib and beer with a hint of biscuit and leaves sparks that start a vast right forest fire a day after he has returned to the city it was an unintended consequence. Even Mrs. O'Leary wasn't entirely aware of the consequence of milking her cow after dark.