Jennifer will get no argument from me that ethanol has been a disaster for everyone who does not happen to be a corn farmer.
However, she writes, “The law of unintended consequences never fails to disappoint.”
Just for the record, unintended consequences are not always bad ones. Take the GI Bill of Rights of 1944. While ostensibly it was to reward the millions who had fought in World War II and made victory possible, the major underlying purpose was to keep these millions out of the job market for as long as possible.
Almost all economists (their clouded crystal balls ever at the ready) thought the end of the war would bring renewed depression. So the bill offered GI’s generous incentives to go to college and trade school instead of finding a job. Academia was horrified at the prospect of hoards of the great unwashed going to college. But the unintended consequence was a much better educated workforce just when one was needed to exploit for peaceful purposes the new technology developed in the war, such as radar, large airframes, jet engines, rockets, computers, etc.
The number of college degrees awarded in 1950 was double the number from 1940. By making college affordable to groups that previously had sent few to higher education, the GI Bill also helped powerfully to open up high-level jobs to groups that had previously been largely excluded from such jobs. The age-old WASP hegemony in the American economy died at the hands of the GI Bill.
Moreover, the housing benefits in the GI Bill, also intended to make education easier to afford, had the unintended consequence of turning a nation of renters into a nation of homeowners, hugely increasing the percentage of American families owning substantial financial assets. This greatly shrunk the “proletariat” and greatly increased the middle class. (Someone should alert the Left. They seem not to have noticed this fact).
Indeed, the GI Bill was almost nothing but unintended consequences. And — suburbia perhaps an exception — the consequences were profoundly good ones.
