The net effect of many other LRRs remains unclear, which likely means they have close to zero net effect too.
Several studies have concluded that deposit insurance is approximately a wash, making depositors’ lives easier but taxpayers’ lives worse when called upon to bail out failed banks. Deposit insurance prevents noisy Great Depression-style bank runs, for example, but at the cost of allowing bankers to take on more risk because depositors have no incentive to discipline them by withdrawing insured funds. Many LRRs do not improve human lives on net.
Yet Obamacare remains the law of the land. Moreover, the slowing was not clearly because of the legislation and if merely slowing growth was its sole intent, it should have been called the Going Bankrupt from Medical Bills Slightly More Slowly Care Act. The rate of growth slowed but remained well above general inflation. Who knows what President Obama really intended but the consequence announced in the title of his one major piece of domestic legislation, the Affordable Care Act, has clearly failed because healthcare costs continue ever upward in real terms. Some refer to this as unintended consequences but intentions remain opaque while announcements, while subject to some interpretation, tend to be relatively transparent. Systemic Corruption occurs whenever laws, rules, or regulations (LRRs) remain in effect despite not leading to announced outcomes. For most people most of the time, Systemic Corruption lay hidden in the grass, a deadly viper ready to rear its ugly head and poison its victims before slithering back into hiding. Its existence becomes crystal clear when its pernicious impact is personal but when it helps specific individuals they tend to praise it to high heaven. Systemic Corruption constitutes a much more serious problem because it is not only legal, it bears the imprimatur of the State. All ultimately fail, but some tamp it down enough to be better off for it. Most countries rightly try to scrub individual corruption out of existence. Such acts resemble a user fee but they are arbitrary and difficult to enforce, and the permits themselves are usually unnecessary, so individual corruption abets economic inefficiency. Most readers are conversant with individual corruption, like when a public official wants a bribe to expedite issuance of a permit. If we could scotch that snake, most socioeconomic problems would dissipate and some would evaporate. What the Left calls Systemic Racism and the Right calls the Deep State or the Swamp represent ideological shadings of a bigger problem sometimes called Systemic Corruption, the corruption that America’s Founders and Framers and European classical liberals like Frederic Bastiat most feared.
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