This is fairly interesting:
Intense emotions can undermine a person's capacity for rational decision-making, even when the individual is aware of the need to make careful decisions. With regard to public policy, when people are angry, afraid or in other elevated emotional states, they tend to favor symbolic, viscerally satisfying solutions to problems over more substantive, complex, but ultimately more effective policies. Over the past 40 years, this has led the United States into two costly and controversial wars, in Vietnam and Iraq, when members of Congress gave the president broad powers in response to a perceived crisis that did not leave sufficient time for deliberation.
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This means that the situations that most require a careful, well-reasoned response are those in which our emotions are most likely to sabotage our long-term interests. America's founding fathers understood that passion could trump principle and therefore vested Congress, a deliberative body in which power is dispersed among dozens of members, with the power to make war, rather than with the president. But that constitutional safeguard began to erode in the 20th century because of the sense of perpetual crisis that emerged during the Cold War and escalated as a result of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The calamitous nature of those attacks gave Americans a distorted sense of the true risk of being killed in a terrorist attack--which is quite low--and policy makers responded with an expansion of federal law enforcement powers, cumbersome security measures and a new war that may ultimately be self-defeating. If, for example, new airport screening procedures prompt more people to drive rather than fly, traffic fatalities will increase, and because driving is far more dangerous than flying, on balance more people will die, even assuming a steady rate of terrorist attacks.
Quite true. Part of the problem with public policy is that the answers which often seem intuitive and obvious can be disastrous. That's why the conservative insistence on "common sense" and down-home policy makin' tends to have such bad effects. Things like health care, Social Security, energy policy -- wonky subjects where liberal technocrats and academics hold forth with boring, complicated ideas that tend to get the punditocracy talking about the need for Big, New Ideas that they can actually understand and make sound sexy. Thus, private accounts were sold as a fiscal solution for Social Security when what the program really needs is Robert Ball's earnest financing tweaks. And, in the same fashion, once the sexy idea faded from the marketplace, nobody ever mentioned Ball's solvency plan again. We've got a political culture right now that prizes emotion and derides rational decision-making, and eventually, we're going to have to deal with the consequences.
