Scott Lincicome points out that “U.S. law and regulation are littered with attempts to ‘fix’ problems caused by other government policies—not by reforming or eliminating those policies but through even more subsidies, tariffs, regulations, or waivers.” He focuses especially on industrial policy proposals that propose to use government action to counter existing government policies — not to repeal those existing policies but to pile on new interventions. But that’s not the only place where we can see the phenomenon.

Take, for instance, the California legislature’s vote to spend “$100 million to rescue its struggling legal marijuana industry,” as the Los Angeles Times headline puts it. The money isn’t going directly to marijuana purveyors. Rather, it will go to cities and counties to help them hire staff to assist businesses in completing the cumbersome environmental studies needed to get the required license. Three years ago I wrote that the costly schedule of regulations and taxes would squeeze out small farmers and entrepreneurs, ensuring that only a few big firms that could afford legal and compliance costs would dominate the market. Turns out, compliance is so costly that even the big firms “continue[] to struggle to compete with the large illicit pot market” of farms and retailers that presumably just aren’t trying to make themselves legal and registered.

Or how about President Biden’s $213 billion federal program for affordable housing? He proposes to build 500,000 affordable units. And upgrade others. And also “an innovative, new competitive grant program” to encourage cities and states to reform or eliminate exclusionary zoning rules. So that part is good, but why do cities and states need a federal grant to change their laws? Meanwhile, Amazon is planning to spend $2 billion to encourage affordable housing. But why spend all this taxpayer (and shareholder) money? Just fix the original problem: zoning and land-use regulations drive up the cost and complexity of building housing. All these new affordable-housing programs are trying to fix a problem caused by existing government programs.

Lincicome concludes:

So the distortions created by entrenched economic policies can get papered over with new government actions, often making things even worse, and can undermine new economic policies that might in theory have a more legitimate justification. These old policies, moreover, are difficult to reform and—in many cases—actually become more entrenched over time.

Before we create new policies, it would behoove us to eliminate the policies that may have caused the very problem we’re trying to solve.