Your mother told you and you didn’t believe it: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And that goes for public policy as well. Emotionally wrought social legislation comes home to roost sooner or later. And later has arrived for many of the ghastly laws and regulations forced on the public in the latter stages of the last century. It’s the theory of unintended consequences, today writ large across the nation and state.
The three young women devoured by free-roaming alligators in Florida didn’t have time to reflect that policies forced through Congress and state legislatures by activist environmentalists turned them into snack food. As I wrote in Animal Planet (September 2001 column—go to www.metronc.com), soon humans will be prevented from leading normal lives for fear of coyotes, bears, moose, deer, foxes, marauding raccoons, otters that bite, hawks that swoop up small pets and sharks trolling the beaches.
The same lobby screams about foreign oil but blocks drilling off the US coast, and trots out pictures of Chernobyl if utility firms suggest nuclear power plants to curtail the use of fossil fuels. Add to this the failed public policy solution that touts rail transit. The same zealots have prevented the construction of roads to push their ideological mania to eliminate the automobile to save the earth. In North Carolina, Mike Easley will go down in history as the “Bad Roads Governor,” and Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker as the “Bad Roads Mayor” for allowing the theory of future rail transit to prevail as public policy. Meanwhile, most roads in the capital city resemble Bolivia’s rather than one of the world’s most advanced high tech communities.
One of the saddest examples of the theory of unintended consequences is the result of policies forced on public schools beginning in the latter half of the last century. Education has regressed—as seen in terrible test scores, a decline in math and science proficiency, a basically illiterate generation gliding through life on cruise control, a mean-ass teacher union interested in pay and benefits over the quality of teaching and a suffocating education bureaucracy that dwarfs the Kremlin under the Bolsheviks. Add to this the insistence by education theorists to maintain busing, even after it was ruled unconstitutional, and despite its failure to close the “achievement gap” between Whites and Blacks. Is it then no wonder that the response by Wake County citizens to yet another school-bond issue is tepid and sometimes hostile? No matter the hype from the state and the chamber of commerce, decades of bad policy has finally registered.
The university has sunk to levels hard to believe from policies instituted over the same era. The take-over of the curriculum by 1960s and ’70s political activists is well documented. Out went the canon of Western Civilization and in came diversity, multiculturalism and politically correct speech codes. The bastion of academic freedom has become the gulag of the oppression of free speech. College graduates since the 1980s know it in their bones. They’ve been screwed out of the very thing they sought: entrance to the upper echelons of human nobility. The university has lost its standards of scholarship and, based on recent events at Duke, its reputation of civility as the administration abandoned its own students and fell for the accusations of an obvious liar solely because she was a black female, which fit the template of the radical scholars in their incessant class war against white males. In their twisted campus point of view, patient examination of the facts should be abandoned in order to smear what appear to be innocent defendants.
OVER AT DUKE
Which brings me to another example of faulty public policy forced upon the public—with the usual dimension of righteousness, but resulting in appalling consequences to society played out globally via the Duke lacrosse team travesty. It began in the early 1990s with the lobby to ban drunk driving, a noble goal in itself, but once again, the unintended consequences of the policies adopted have created larger and more dangerous results. The process followed a familiar pattern. Anti-drunk driving activists first lobbied the federal agencies, in this case the Department of Transportation, which in turn had legislation introduced in Congress that raised the legal drinking age to 21 across the country.
As is so often forgotten, most issues in public life are a matter for the states to decide, as is the case with driver licenses. Consequently, the new federal mandate raising the drinking age had no effect, unless the states passed a similar statute. The next chapter is a dramatic example of the sometimes tyrannical posture of the federal juggernaut. Each state was contacted by the US Department of Transportation and warned that unless they passed a conforming state law on the drinking age, the department would withhold that state’s share of federal transportation funds.
Thus extorted, all states capitulated and hurried legislation to meet the terms. And the unintended consequence has been to alienate an entire generation of young people. Try telling a 20-year-old he or she can’t drink a beer, although they are old enough to vote and be inducted in the armed forces. If college-bound, is it rational to think they will go through most of their years on campus and not drink a beer? Of course not: faulty public policy, fueled by moral indignation— the signifying identity of late 20th- century legislation—leads to serious results that cannot be swept away by fiat.
Back when the drinking age was 18 for beer and 21 for liquor in North Carolina and most other states, young people took on the ritual in public places. Most had their first legal beer in a pizza joint with a date, in a room full of people. College-aged kids learned to drink responsibly, at least in public. Today, under the wrath of the ridiculous new drinking laws and motivated by resentment for the society that would impose such blatant restrictions, kids drink in private—and, as is always the case, in groups. Families who leave town often return to find their houses have been taken over for drinking parties. Kids book hotel rooms, use their own rented apartments or houses, or stake out rural tracts like Druids to act out the compelling ritual of alcohol consumption.
In these settings, the goal is to get drunk, and fast. There is no societal brake that says handle alcohol properly. Other public moral proscriptions hardly apply, like restraints on sex—hard to control when everyone is drunk and dedicated to getting drunker as fast as possible. Young people who came of age at the time of the new laws have been ostracized from society at large, and they react by sticking it right back by hedonistic behavior and a bad attitude.
The consequences of this badly though-out and ill-fated law, although conceived in the righteousness of a moral crusade that no one can argue, has torn social life asunder. And the party at the house on Buchanan Street in Durham where the lacrosse team captain lived is simply an example of the status quo created by bad social policy motivated by a moral cause. Our culture is sinking into mediocrity all in the name of good intentions.