The Good Intentions Paving Company

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,…