The Complexity and Imperfection of Solutions

According to an NPR story, the clearance rate for murder, meaning the percentage of cases in which someone is arrested (or identified), is 64.1% nationally. This will vary by community. That means that a lot of murderers have not been identified and have been running around the country while being murderers.

If that shocks you, color yourself naive. Yes, the clearance rate has dropped badly, while at the same time the rate of violent crime has dropped, yet even at 90% clearance, a significant number of murderers got away with it. Certainly, enough got away with it to convince arrogant potential murderers to think they might be the one that gets away. A key factor in preventing any activity that’s criminal or disapproved is the extent to which the criminal expects to get caught. For a summary, see Deterrence in Criminal Justice. (I’d prefer to cite other sources, but they are behind a pay wall, and this article cites those sources.)

My point here is not criminal deterrence, but rather the fact that the things we do to achieve a result are not necessarily going to achieve the result we expect. For many people the way to eliminate an undesirable activity is to make it illegal. If you make a law, you’ll fix the problem. But we live regularly with problems that have not been fixed by the laws created for that purpose. Politicians know how to play on expectations when they name laws. The Affordable Care Act does not necessarily provide affordable care and the Violent Crime Control Act may not actually control violent crime. Even when things go well the cause may not be the one seen as obvious.

There is a common saying that you can’t legislate morality. In one sense that’s nonsense, in that you can write any law you want. You can even declare the Bible to be your basic law. I’d love to see the hermeneutic used. Personally, I would want Matthew 7:1 to be absolutely and universally applicable, but then I have a bit of the anarchist in me. You can write a law telling people not to be selfish, but enforcement might be a problem. So yes, you can write a law saying anything, but that law might not be effective. So in another sense, it’s good sense, in that you have to legislate behavior, not morality, and laws vary in how well they can control behavior. In yet another sense, even a law that successfully alters behavior will not necessarily make those who follow it more moral, and in that sense you really can’t legislate morality.

Most of us want to do so, however. We want to make laws that really fix problems, and we expect that, having made the law, the problem will be fixed. This leads to a great deal of very bad law. I use a rule of thumb. If you hear words like “epidemic,” “national tragedy,” or other similar words, assume that the resulting legislation will be a mess, often causing more problems than it solves and ruining many people’s lives in the interest of solving perceived problems. As in the case of immigration and refugees, often these laws are written to solve problems that don’t really exist.

Watch out as well for “even one ____ is intolerable.” You’re not going to eliminate all instances of a behavior that anyone perceives as desirable. Someone is going to do it. We hear this with topics such as child abuse, murder, terrorism, or sexual crimes. “Not one case!” yells the politician, sounding so virtuous and determined. But at  a minimum, there’s one lie there. Nothing that politician does will eliminate all cases. The law cannot make you perfectly safe. As you hear about solving the “opioid epidemic,” be aware that government agents will be ruining the lives of people who are genuinely trying to live with pain, all in the name of preventing addictions by someone else somewhere else.

I find it totally amazing that people who advocate limited government in some ways are quite determined to get the government more involved elsewhere and somehow assume that the government’s actions will be effective. The same issues that make regulatory agencies subject to stupidity and chicanery apply to every other aspect of government as well. Your local police or the FBI can be a bureaucracy as much as the EPA.

That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a law. It just means that we need to shed our naivete about how making laws will fix things. Here are some key points:

1. Correctly identify the problem. I have no idea how many people want to solve an epidemic of violent crime while violent crime is actually in decline. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to do some work. I believe we do. But we need to look at what the actual cause is.
2. Look at solutions that will actually improve the situation. If the likelihood of getting caught is, indeed, more critical than the severity of sentence (see citation above), then what we need is better enforcement, not longer sentences (or some combination). You might need to increase the size and training budget of your police force rather than changing the criminal laws themselves, for example.
3. Do not expect any solution to make you perfectly safe. The world will still have murderers, rapists, terrorists, and other evildoers in it. Trying to make the law accomplish more than it can is wasteful and increases the negative effects.
4. Once legislation is in place, test it. Find out what has happened and do your best to determine what the cause was. Review the law and its results.
5. Be ready to hear about revision. Fear of what may happen if we change often prevents reform efforts. For example, for those who believe that there should be a welfare safety net, the idea of welfare reform is frightening. Fear prevents progress. It can also prevent deterioration, but that’s not at all guaranteed!
6. Don’t believe the labels. The name of a law doesn’t mean the law does what it says. Politicians are veteran label manipulators.

In this information age, there is a great deal of data available to you. Read it instead of the anecdotes (many of them false), shared on your Facebook feed.