“I did it with the best of intentions.”
Good intentions is one of the easiest ways to waste big bunches of money, yet good intentions empower a lot of giving. Sadly, the gifts don't produce nearly as many good results as the givers expect them to. The reason for the difference between expectation and result is simple: The givers are not paying attention to what their gifts get used for.
Here is a simple example: The person standing on the busy street corner with a cardboard sign. What do you know about this person other than they are standing on a corner with a cardboard sign? Giving him or her money is a good intention, but is it producing a good result? The giver has no idea.
What needs to be mixed in thoroughly with good intentions is vigilance. Important questions must be asked: Are good results coming from the actions motivated by these good intentions? Are you checking to make sure? This is partly what well established charities offer - they take care of due diligence. When they don't, and this is discovered, there is scandal.
When vigilance slacks off, the gifts can be used for anything, and this means big waste. As an example: One giving area that has been plagued with poor oversight for many decades is Americans trying to help Haiti. This 18 May 14 WSJ editorial, “Bill, Hillary and the Haiti Debacle: Haitians are upset by the reconstruction effort managed by the Clintons” by Mary Anastasia O'Grady, talks about a current debacle. From the article, "Four years after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake toppled the capital city of Port-au-Prince and heavily damaged other parts of the country, hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department's US Agency for International Development (USAID), allocated to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) are gone. Hundreds of millions more to the IHRC from international donors have also been spent. Left behind is a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects. Haitians are angry, frustrated and increasingly suspicious of the motives of the IHRC and of its top official, Mr. Clinton. Americans might feel the same way if they knew more about this colossal failure. One former Haitian official puts it this way: ‘I really cannot understand how you could raise so much money, put a former US president in charge, and get this outcome.’”
This is a high-profile example of where good intentions have been strong but vigilance has been lacking.
Gifts such as those given to help Haiti are a small problem compared to the good intentions swirling around health care. This 31 May 12 Economist article, “The $272 billion swindle: Why thieves love America’s health-care system”, describes a huge example of good intentions without good vigilance. From the article, “Health care is a tempting target for thieves. Medicaid doles out $415 billion a year; Medicare (a federal scheme for the elderly), nearly $600 billion. Total health spending in America is a massive $2.7 trillion, or 17% of GDP. No one knows for sure how much of that is embezzled, but in 2012 Donald Berwick, a former head of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and Andrew Hackbarth of the RAND Corporation, estimated that fraud (and the extra rules and inspections required to fight it) added as much as $98 billion, or roughly 10%, to annual Medicare and Medicaid spending—and up to $272 billion across the entire health system.” The article goes on to describe many examples.
This is happening because the good intentions are not being followed up with good vigilance. This is goat sacrificing on a huge scale. One solution to getting spending and results tied together more closely is to get more free market involvement - have people pay directly for their health care, not pay insurance companies or the government, who then pay the health care providers.
Another place good intentions can produce waste is by encouraging people to support enthusiastic prescription: Telling other people how to run their lives. An example of this is telling other people what to do to “save the earth”. This enthusiastic prescriptiveness runs afoul of the different circumstances people live in. Different circumstances mean that priorities are different, therefore effective solutions are different. As we have seen in a previous chapter, when people support the government getting overly prescriptive, those who object call it Nanny Statism.
This 25 Apr 14 WSJ article, “Partners in Ethanol Crime: The corn-fuel mandate has been an invitation to mass fraud”, provides one of many examples of good intentions leading to prescription without vigilance, which transforms actions into government shakedown and outright fraud. These actions do not lead to the better world the good intended people supporting this prescription had in mind.
The moral: Supporting prescription without paying attention to the results of what is being prescribed produces waste rather than good results.
Good intentions are a powerful force for good in the world. But when the good intentions are not accompanied by good vigilance, the results will be lots of waste not a better world.