Trump’s plans and natural laws
It’s hard to escape the Trump effect.
Every news bulletin, social media, conversation and joke all has Trump as a prominent ingredient.
There has been much analysis of what happened, why it happened, and conspiracy theories galore.
From our part of the world, does it matter and should we care? What can we learn? There are two very good reasons for us to take a strong interest – the two laws affecting all governments that even Trump cannot change.
Murphy’s Law and The Law of Unintended Consequences are powerful and potentially destructive forces, and the US is about to find out just how intentions and Executive Orders that do not give sufficient weight to these forces can turn into disaster and come back to bite hard.
Trump’s wall will become Trump’s folly as the unintended consequences hit home.
Building it is difficult but not impossible.
Patrolling it and maintaining it will rapidly become a huge burden and failure to do both will rapidly render it useless.
Before billions are spent it would be well to look at the lessons of history.
The Maginot Line, Hadrian’s Wall, and the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall are all now historical curiosities, visited annually by thousands of tourists.
If America again becomes the Land of the Free and the Brave and not the Land of the Fenced and Paranoid, Trump’s folly will serve the same purpose, having been as useless as it predecessors at achieving its objective.
The fence will put up the price of drugs in America, and provide bigger incentives for people to become more creative in their attempts to smuggle contraband, almost surely guaranteeing the defeat of the wall and increased drug use and profit for smugglers.
The Law of Unintended Consequences at work!
The American trade practices foreshadowed by the new President run similar risks.
The US has long talked Free Trade and practiced protectionism and subsidies.
Intensifying these practices, as the new regime seems hell-bent on doing will have serious flow on effects, and not only in trade.
Countries not prepared to be bullied by giant US corporations (and I hope we are one) will look for new and expanding markets in other areas.
For the US, giving up the moral high ground of even a pretence of free and fair trade will be a license for brand and patent piracy on an unprecedented scale.
Then the immigration and refugee ban will make Trump the best recruiter ISIS has got. What should we do? Look beyond the rhetoric, watch for the workings of the two immutable Laws, and hope and pray that a shooting war is not the ultimate Unintended Consequence.
With an election here this year, remember the beauty of democracy is you get to live with the results of your decisions.
Look behind the rhetoric and name calling, inform yourself as well as you can and we may get it right, or at least find it easier to live with the result than the US will.