"One cannot legislate problems out of existence. It has been tried"
About this Quote
Austine’s line lands like a dry memo from the edge of a conference table: the kind of sentence that sounds calm right up until it indicts everyone in the room. “One cannot legislate problems out of existence” takes aim at a perennial fantasy of governance and management culture alike: that a rule, a statute, a compliance checklist can do the messy work of changing human behavior, incentives, or reality itself. The second sentence - “It has been tried” - is the knife twist. It’s not a theory; it’s a verdict delivered with bureaucratic understatement.
The specific intent is to puncture solutionism. Augustine isn’t arguing against law so much as against the belief that law is a magic eraser. The subtext is impatience with symbolic victories: policies written to signal control, to satisfy constituencies, or to create the appearance of action, while leaving the underlying mechanisms untouched. It’s also a warning about unintended consequences. Legislating against a problem can drive it underground, reshape it into a new form, or redirect it toward whoever has the least power to absorb the cost.
Context matters because Augustine’s public life sits at the intersection of engineering, defense, and institutional risk - fields where failure punishes wishful thinking quickly. The line reads like hard-earned institutional memory: a reminder that constraints on paper don’t automatically become constraints in practice. Its rhetorical power is the minimalism. No anecdotes, no numbers, just a clipped empirical shrug that dares you to argue with history.
The specific intent is to puncture solutionism. Augustine isn’t arguing against law so much as against the belief that law is a magic eraser. The subtext is impatience with symbolic victories: policies written to signal control, to satisfy constituencies, or to create the appearance of action, while leaving the underlying mechanisms untouched. It’s also a warning about unintended consequences. Legislating against a problem can drive it underground, reshape it into a new form, or redirect it toward whoever has the least power to absorb the cost.
Context matters because Augustine’s public life sits at the intersection of engineering, defense, and institutional risk - fields where failure punishes wishful thinking quickly. The line reads like hard-earned institutional memory: a reminder that constraints on paper don’t automatically become constraints in practice. Its rhetorical power is the minimalism. No anecdotes, no numbers, just a clipped empirical shrug that dares you to argue with history.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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