Unintended Consequences

The US is funding a fleet of planes in Columbia that spray cocaine plants. The thing is, it kinda works against us. A few mutant plants aren’t killed. The farmers make cuttings from those plants and distribute them, resulting in whole fields of cocaine plants resistant to spraying. Since the spraying kills all other plants too, the result is that our planes actually do the weeding for the farmers, eliminating other plants competing for soil nutrients. We enable the cocaine plants to grow stronger.

Not only that, but the spraying often ends up killing legitimate crops. So, to earn a living, farmers turn to the only crop that is resistant to spraying--the "Roundup Ready" cocaine.

It just shows that problems aren't always as easy to solve as we think.

I just finished a little Newsweek article about John Kerry urging Democrats to moderate their pro-abortion views. Hardly anybody agrees with partial-birth abortion; most people view it as an extreme and unreasonable procedure. If the Democrats had come out against partial-birth abortion, more undecided voters might have swung their way. But the Planned Parenthood hardliners won’t allow that, citing Slippery Slope arguments: if they give in on this admittedly extreme position, they'll next be asked to compromise on something less extreme, and then something else--until, eventually, abortion is outlawed altogether. It’s the same reason the National Rifle Association adamantly defends the right of hunters to bear bazookas. And so, apparently, the pro-abortion hard-liners, in a most unpragmatic fashion, would seemingly rather lose an election than moderate their agenda.

But people on the right can be just as unpragmatic. I think it was Charles Colson that I heard speak about this some years ago. He said that during the 1980s, Congress could have passed legislation banning abortion in many cases. However, the legislation was deemed soft, compromising, by Religious Right hardliners who insisted on banning all abortions. They took an "all or nothing" position--and got nothing. Colson said (I’m making up numbers, because I don’t know the real ones), "If there are now two million abortions a year, and we could have prevented one million of them--wouldn’t that have been a good thing? But by refusing to take what we could get, at that time, we effectively gave our permission for a million more babies to be aborted each year."

But, had pro-life legislators backed such partial measures, they would have reaped the wrath of the all-or-nothing crowd, their key supporters, and possibly been committing political suicide. Interesting, the choices politicians must make.

Posted on December 15, 2004 06:35 PM|

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