John Steele Gordon Quotes
All laws have unintended consequences.
John Steele Gordon, Economic Historian & Commentator, Congressional Staff Assistant, Hamilton’s Blessing, 1997
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He was discussing “Stand Your Ground Laws” which were enacted to solve one problem, but then effected many other things negatively. The law, once passed, is the law regardless of whether it has adverse consequences that the legislators never anticipated. This is one of the reasons that drafting legislation is such a difficult skill.
There seem to be many unintended consequences to most new legislation and reform legislation is almost always breaking new ground.
In world history man’s actions result in something quite different from what he purposes or intends.
This is an early statement of what is referred to as “the law of unintended consequences.”
John Steele Gordon is an American writer who specializes in the history of business and finance. Born and raised in New York City, he graduated from Vanderbilt University. After spending some time in publishing, he left to travel, driving from England to India and back and from New York to Tierra del Fuego, returning as far as Rio de Janeiro. His first book was a how-to book on how to do this type of overland traveling. After working in politics for a few years as a press secretary for two congressmen, he wrote his first book on financial history, The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street (1988), a history of Wall Street in the 1860s. His history of the national debt, Hamilton's Blessing, was published in 1997 (2nd edition, 2010). In 2004 he published a history of the American economy, An Empire of Wealth. He has also written on technological history, including A Thread Across the Ocean, the story of laying the Atlantic cable in the mid-19th century, and Washington's Monument, a history of the monument and obelisks in general. John Steele Gordon wrote the Business of America column for American Heritage magazine for 15 years and The Long View column for Barron's for ten years. He currently writes a column on banking history for the ABA banking journal. His op-eds and book reviews appear frequently in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. In 2019, Mr. Gordon wrote on global warming from a skeptical point of view for Commentary (magazine).
