A sample of a government-issued vaccination certificate
Every government intervention creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.
– Ludwig von Mises
It didn’t come as a shock to staff at the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance to hear that fraudulent documents purporting to be Australian government-issued vaccination certificates were available for roughly the same price as a black-market carton of cigarettes.
“Any time the government thinks it’s creating rules, all it’s doing is increasing the incentives for people to break them,” said Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance Chief Operating Officer Gabe Buckley. “The more the government attempts to coerce society with vaccine passports and the like, the more attractive alternatives to compliance become.”
“We have a text-book example of the phenomenon in action with Australia’s tobacco laws. The more the difficult the government makes it to purchase legitimate cigarettes, the greater the volume of black-market tobacco flooding the market.” Mr Buckley – a former Information Technology consultant – went on to explain that such legislation, often drafted in a rush generates a flurry of activity aimed at exploiting weaknesses in the technological solutions proposed by governments sorely lacking in technical competence. “We’ve seen it with every contact tracing application that governments release. They are disassembled with the source code available online within hours.
The ATA’s Chief Economist Dr John Humphreys explained that the potential for an increase in criminal activity was a well-understood phenomenon in economics. “Perverse incentives and the potential for unintended consequences have been understood for quite some time. Economics is the study of human decision-making, government appears to be resistant to the idea that humans even make decisions.”
The over-reliance on technological solutions, and the increasing tendency to co-opt business into its enforcement regimes also poses specific problems for legislators. “The level of technological skill required to adequately secure a digital resource such as vaccine certificates is simply beyond the comprehension of most people, there is no such thing as an un-hackable system” Mr Buckley said.
