https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/06/the-good-intentions-pavin
Regarded by many as the Anglosphere’s greatest essayist, Joseph Epstein is also owed our gratitude for popularising the wonderful notion of the Good Intentions Paving Company. He does not claim to have created the phrase. This belongs to the wonderful novelist Saul Bellow, who once wrote a novel (Ravelstein) about one of the most consequential culture warriors of the late twentieth century, Allan Bloom.
Epstein first visited the Good Intentions Paving Company in 2013 in the Wall Street Journal, penning a piece on the then emerging ObamaCare universal health-care scheme, conceived (perhaps) with the great intention of bringing health cover to the Americans then excluded. The disastrous, unintended consequences of many government schemes and popular movements featured in Epstein’s WSJ article, “No Child Left Behind, the Iraq War, affirmative action, and the Russian Revolution”. One thing that all these things had in common – they all seemed like a good idea at the time, at least to many. Truly dangerous political ideas are those which are both ambitious and popular.
We could add some of our own ambitious policy disasters in the Australian context – the Ken Henry inspired “cash splash” of the Rudd years, the now notorious NBN, the NDIS, various “Gonskis”, pink batts, and so on. Bob Hawke, normally a cautious policy man and a centrist, made his emphatic claim to eliminate child poverty. Mercifully, he didn’t enact any (inevitably doomed) policies to attempt to achieve his lofty yet ludicrous ambition. Malcolm Fraser had his candidates for the Good Intentions Paving Company – the SBS and multiculturalism stand out. Some might even argue (almost heretically) that Sir Robert Menzies had his moments with the Good Intentions Paving Company. Think of the (admittedly tiny but nonetheless portentous) expansion of higher education and the Vietnam War.