The city of Houston recently enacted stricter regulations governing boarding houses. The Houston Chronicle reported that:
The ordinances — prompted by several fires in unregulated and unsafe multi-resident housing facilities over the last year — follow months of meetings between city officials and community groups and wrangling between city agencies.
The purported goal of the new regulations is to make boarding houses safer. The result will be that boarding houses will be more expensive as they pass on the costs of the new ordinances, and invariably, many will close because they are unable to meet those costs.
The intended beneficiaries of the ordinances are those who live in boarding houses. But many will be unable to afford the higher costs imposed by stricter regulations. They will become victims of a policy intended to benefit them. But few will see the cause. They, and their advocates, will only see the effect. And then, they will likely demand another government program to address the problems caused by a previous government intervention.
On Wednesday, one woman who nearly died in one of last year’s fires said she was pleased the city had taken steps to make the facilities safer.
“That’s wonderful,” said Cherika Argus, 38. “They’ve been needing to do it for a while, but I’m glad they finally did.”
In other words, Argus wasn’t willing to take responsibility and find safer accommodations. Instead, “they” needed to do something to protect her. And when the protection that “they” have provided causes new problems, Argus and her ilk will demand that “they” do something else.
Morally, we are each responsible for our own lives. If we want certain effects, then we have to enact their cause. When we depend on others to do so, there is a good chance that we will find ourselves living in a very unsafe place. And we can only blame ourselves–we enacted the cause.