Barbara Tuchman once said, “A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”

I think this is a critically important observation, and also a very dangerous one, because it can be used to obscure the truth as readily as reveal it.

Whereas it is true that governments don’t know how best to pursue specific goals in their own interest (and Mises and Rothbard argued, of course, that the inherent lack of economic calculation made all broad-scale state activities chaotic, wasteful, and ineffective), it is also important to remember that governments are not independent collective entities; they are peopled by individuals with individual interests and goals seldom discussed when considering the supposed intentions of proposed policies.

Specifically, every individual in power has the incentive to (a) remain in power, (b) maintain the income flow that results from that power, (c) grow in power, and (d) grow the income that results from that ever-growing power. When considered from this methodologically individualist perspective, most policy proposals accomplish personal goals a–d for most of their advocates, whether or not the bigger picture looks bumbling and chaotic.

But since we’re on the subject of seemingly self-destructive policy, here’s another gem from Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty (print, pdf, audio). The English government wanted to be able to call upon a big navy without having to plan and finance the building and maintaining of such a navy. The solution was to make sure it was easy to draft sailors and ships. But one problem was that English merchants were starting to imitate the Dutch in the use of smaller, cheaper, and faster crafts. The government needed bigger, bulkier, slower, more expensive warships.

To this end a navigation act was introduced in 1540 requiring the use of the larger, more expensive, and less efficient ships of the English shipowners and captains instead of the smaller, less expensive Dutch ships. However, privileged merchants, such as the Merchant Adventurers, in trade with Spain or its possessions (for example, Spain and the Netherlands), were exempted and could, by employing Dutch shipping, gain a competitive advantage over independent English merchants.

But that’s only step 1. Remember what Mises said about first interventions causing unwanted consequences, thus leading to further interventions to attempt to correct the earlier intervention. Between the politically motivated creation of Anglican Protestantism and the militarily motivated crippling of the English fishing vessels, the government nearly destroyed the English fishing industry.

Decreased English participation in the North Sea herring fishery caused by the greater efficiency of the Dutch as well as by the Reformation, which greatly reduced the religiously based demand for fish in England, greatly alarmed the English government. To maintain the traditional source of impressment of men into the government’s navy, a statute of 1549 imposed upon the English a political abstinence from meat under penalty of fine, in place of the previous purely religious abstinence.

That’s right: Protestants under an officially Protestant government were forced to eat like fish-on-Friday Catholics in order to create the commercial demand necessary to support the artificially bulky and inefficient English fishing ships so that those same ships and their crews would be available in case the government ever decided it wanted to confiscate and enslave them to create a last-minute navy.