Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you decided to buy an old house in a small town.\u00a0 We’ll call the town Lincolnville and put it in Monkeybelch County, Texas.\u00a0 So this house isn’t really much, really just a squat and blocky brownstone on the less attractive side of town, but it was cheap, and you can work on it weekends until you retire or flip it.<\/p>\n
While rummaging through the junk-filled attic, you discover a portrait of a man standing beside an open coffin with another man’s corpse in it–weird, but not really unlikely in an old west town.\u00a0 This piques your interest, however, and you look into the history of your ugly little house.\u00a0 With the help of a city clerk and a librarian, you discover that the house was where Ron “Pornstache”\u00a0Lipschulz shot Hezekiah “Hezekiah” Barbar, ending the Monkeybelch Range War and determining the course of the entire Monkeybelch Draw Valley’s history.\u00a0 Your house is historic!<\/p>\n
So the city clerk convinces you to register your squat toad of a house with the National Historic Registry, which causes you to jump through a few hoops to prove provenance and to prove that the end of the Monkeybelch Range War was in some way significant to national history (Monkeybelch county is the nation’s number 7 producer of scorpions embedded in yellow-tinted Lucite that looks kind of like amber).<\/p>\n
Only now your weekend project got complicated.\u00a0 Now that your home is historic, you have to maintain its architectural integrity.\u00a0 Instead of just repairing the walls, cleaning up the yard and figuring out some way to make the front less glaringly unattractive, you now have to follow specific rules, laws, and guidelines guiding you in every step of repair and upgrades.\u00a0 Simply bringing the building up to the point where Registry officials won’t fine you for mistreating a National Treasure will cost you twice as much as the building purchase ran in the first place.\u00a0 You’d have been better off ignoring the place’s historic significance and just bulldozing it to make room for a three-bedroom clapboard ranch.<\/p>\n
Or, let’s say you have a pine tree in your yard.\u00a0 This thing is seventy-five feet tall and weighs upwards of five tons.\u00a0 And it’s dead.\u00a0 Between pine beetles and the recent droughts, it just gave up, and now you cringe every time a stiff breeze blows through your neighborhood.\u00a0 So you call a reputable tree service to take care of it without destroying your house.<\/p>\n
The only problem is, while inspecting the tree, they discovered a bird’s nest.\u00a0 Not just a bird’s nest, but a nest of Shrill Tiny Mud-Colored Annoying Birds.\u00a0 They’re on the Endangered Species list.\u00a0 They were put on the list in 1978, when it was discovered that there were only 300 of them in the entire country.\u00a0 Now, of course, you have to elbow them out of the way just to get down the street, but they remain on the list because development threatens their natural woodland habitat (the six thousand birds that seem happy to live in your neighborhood and crap on your car are considered “aberrations”).\u00a0 That tree has to stay up, because birds.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately for you, when the next big thunderstorm comes through and your dead tree crashes into your house, you’re screwed.\u00a0 Your insurance company considers your failure to remove a clearly dead tree to be negligence, and they won’t pay out if you act like a dumbass.<\/p>\n
These are perverse incentives: times when the effect of government regulations is the opposite of their intent.\u00a0 The US Code is rife with laws and regulations that punish people for doing the right thing.\u00a0 My last example probably sounds familiar because it is a popular plot for sitcoms.\u00a0 Unfortunately, it is also a reality for many people whose lives have been disrupted by the Endangered Species Act<\/a>.<\/p>\n Believe it or not, encouraging common citizens to ignore or violate the law is not<\/em> the most common result of perverse incentives.\u00a0 The most common result, and, in my view, the most harmful, is the manufacturing of narratives.\u00a0 Last January, I started hearing about the huge drought that Houston was entering this year, which was surprising, because Houston didn’t start lagging behind on rainfall until the middle of February, when the jet stream that gives us dry Decembers reappeared.\u00a0 As it stands, we’ are about three inches behind average for the first quarter, most of it in February and March.\u00a0 Of course, we’ve already gotten half our April average in the first week, with more expected.\u00a0 But the narrative remains that we’re heading for a drought that will be worse than 2011.<\/p>\n