We all want to do our best to help ensure polar bears don’t go extinct, but the current push to list them officially as threatened exemplifies the tendency to ignore unintended consequences, argues S. T. Karnick in an op-ed published today in the New York Post.

The common human response when confronted by something we don’t like is to say, "Somebody should do something!" And in the modern era, that means government, and "something" means whatever most strongly suggests that the people behind the proposed policy really, really care.

This is a cultural issue in that the mentality currently dominant in our schools and media values feelings over thoughts, and gestures over common sense. Until we change our culture, our politics will continually be corrupted by such foolish gestures.

The reality is that all actions have consequences, as Newton discovered about the physical world and James Burnham pointed out about the political realm. And often those consequences are things we didn’t expect at all.

Economists call this the Law of Unntended Consequences. 

But when we know in advance what the negative consequences of a policy will be, we have only ourselves to blame.

That’s the case with the current concern over polar bears and whether to list them as an endangered species, as I note in my oped in today’s New York Post. One, polar bears are absolutely not threatened with extinction from manmade global warming. And two, falsely listing them as threatened with extinction would set in motion a process by which economic growth across the entire country could be stymied by a powerful new burst of regulation.

Unexpected, unintended negative consequences of a necessary action are a tragedy.  Expected and therefore intended negative consequences of an entirely unnecessary action are a disgrace. Read it here.