Bromides, old saws, vignettes and maybe a little wisdom

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." My father said that so often I thought it was his. Not so. It's in the Aeneid. Virgil beat him to it by a couple of couple of millennia.

Fires, homeless and riots in Los Angeles

Call me naive, but I believe good people are drawn to public service. While I do believe power corrupts - many public servants started their careers poor and end up rich - I continue to believe that few politicians are outright crooks. The few who are and get caught make headlines, which taints our perception of the whole class. But I don’t believe this reflects the majority of our public servants. I do think many of them are “true believers” and fail to look beyond their own good intentions. They don’t consider unintended consequences. I also believe that the people who set out to fix all the ills of this world genuinely believe that all human beings are as honest and well intended as they. Perhaps my world-view - that everyone tries to get what they want and most never stop to consider how they go about achieving it - shapes my perspective. “After all it was just a little lie I told, a little insignificant rule I broke.” That’s human nature, and to me those who don’t see the world that way are the exception, not the rule, and even more naive than I.

I want to highlight a few well-intentioned policies, created by elected officials in Los Angeles and California, that were implimented thinking they would make California and L.A. a better place:

There are 1,300 fewer cops in the LAPD than there were in 2015. That because budgets were short and social services were more important. Social services couldn’t possibly be cut, could they?

Shoplifting, trespassing, disorderly conduct and vandalism are rarely prosecuted in L.A. because some officials didn’t want to ruin the lives of others by giving them criminal records

Minimum wage in Los Angeles is $17.28. Surely that will bring more income to low skilled workers.

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Now let me give you a few unintended consequences we live with in L.A.:

Since 2010 L.A. County has had an “out-migration” of 1,400,000 souls, partially offset, by the arrival of 530,000 migrants.

Unemployment rate for teens in LA is 21.2% in an economy with less that 5% total unemployment.

Cronic absence is defined by L.A. Unified School District as missing 1 in 10 days or more. This year the percentage of chronically absent students was almost one-third of the entire student body.

Is it the paving?