That’s the subtitle of Thomas Sowell‘s valuable book, Applied Economics (Basic Books, 2004).
Too many of us refuse to look beyond the stated goals of public policies, Sowell warns us. We fail to see the harmful consequences of those policies in the second and later stages.
Take, for example, price controls:
In short, misconceptions of the economic function of prices lead not only to price controls, with all their counterproductive consequences, but also to organized attempts by various institutions, laws, and policies to get those prices paid for by somebody else. For society as a whole, there is no somebody else. Yet few of those in politics seem prepared to face that fact. Economists may say that there is no such thing as a free lunch but politicians get elected by promising free lunches.
…
Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, and (4) black markets.
