Powerline by Scott Johnson 3/2/2025
We are all familiar with Parkinson’s law: Work expands to fill the time available to do it. I haven’t heard much about it lately. It still applies in my case, but maybe time and times have changed in the digital age.
The late, great Robert Conquest formulated what what have come to be known as Conquest’s Three Laws of politics. They seem to be iron laws. John Derbyshire recalled them as follows:
• Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
• Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
• The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
I wonder if the phenomenon of homelessness is not susceptible to such laws. I tentatively propose this as a starter: “The homeless population always expands to exceed the supply of housing for the homeless.”
Catherine Coleman Flowers argues to the contrary in the Los Angeles Times column “The seemingly intractable problem that the US can actually solve.” For more realistic reading on the subject, see Rachel Sheffield’s Jewish World Review column “Non-fanciful homelessness solutions” and Sanjana Friedman’s City Journal column “Urban anarchy.”
If my proposed law has any truth in it, many variants can probably be found in the work of Thomas Sowell. Here are 30 of his sayings compiled by the Foundation for Economic Education:
• Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly—and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.
• When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
• In other words, evidence is too dangerous—politically, financially and psychologically—for some people to allow it to become a threat to their interests or to their own sense of themselves.
• People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
• Some things must be done on faith, but the most dangerous kind of faith is that which masquerades as “science.”
• It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
• Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.
• There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.
• Open-ended demands are a mandate for ever-expanding government bureaucracies with ever-expanding budgets and powers.
• I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.
More:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/03/a-proposed-law.php
