UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF THE FAIR TAX

As a long-standing practicioner, I’ve long asserted that the fundamental obligation of systems engineering is to search for unintended consequences of product design decisions. I’ve even gone so far as to propose the Three Laws of Unintended Consequences, following in the footsteps of Isaac Asimov in his I, Robot collection of short stories.

They are:

First Law: There are always unintended consequences.
Second Law: At least one will be bad.
Third Law: It will appear at the most inopportune time.

But not all unintended consequences are bad. Most are just, well, unintended; and some may well be good.

And that brings me to the Fair Tax. It strikes me that the Fair Tax has unintended consequences that may prove to be very good indeed. Since the Fair Tax is not imposed on resales, it seems reasonable to think that it may cause (a) an uptick in recycling, and (b) a move away from “throw away” to “repair and reuse.”

For me personally, the latter is an important issue. I’m constantly frustrated by having to toss some useful item because of a minor defect which is more costly to repair than it is to replace.