"Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place."
— Walter E. Williams, 2008
Williams taught economics at George Mason University for decades and wrote a syndicated column that put price theory into plain English for readers who had never sat through a lecture on it. He was very good at making an argument land in three sentences.
This is one of them: a compressed account of how policy compounds. A rule creates a distortion, the distortion becomes a crisis, the crisis justifies a further rule. Every step is defensible on its own terms, which is exactly what makes the sequence so difficult to reverse.
