Take a billion dollars.
Place it on the table where everyone can see it.
Then announce that anyone capable of delivering the right kind of project, producing the right kind of paperwork, reciting the right kind of slogans, and ticking the right collection of bureaucratic boxes will be allowed to dip their hands into the pile.
Then stand back and watch.
The reaction is as predictable as gravity.
Consultants appear from nowhere.
Developers emerge from the undergrowth.
Experts materialize overnight.
Think tanks begin producing reports.
Lobbyists discover a newfound passion for saving humanity.
And project promoters sprint toward the money with all the enthusiasm of starving men spotting an unattended banquet.
Many people blame the project promoters.
I don’t.
Their role is simple.
Their function is to make money.
That is what they are designed to do.
Whether the project actually helps anyone is often a secondary consideration.
Whether it solves a real problem barely enters the equation.
Whether it creates prosperity, destroys prosperity, improves lives, or quietly wrecks entire industries matters far less than whether it qualifies for funding.
The incentives point one way.
Human beings follow incentives.
That is not evil.
It is merely human.
If governments decide that money should flow toward projects involving fashionable narratives, then suddenly thousands of people become passionate believers in fashionable narratives.
If tomorrow governments announced a trillion-dollar initiative to study migratory patterns among left-handed squirrels, there would be no shortage of squirrel experts by next Tuesday.
The market always adapts.
The cockroaches are simply responding to the smell of food.
That is what cockroaches do.
They follow crumbs.
They do not stop to ask where the crumbs came from.
Nor do they particularly care.
They are not interested in whether the project destroys ancient forests to harvest materials.
They are not interested in children digging minerals from the ground in distant countries.
They are not interested in populations breathing toxic industrial fumes so someone else can claim environmental virtue.
They are not interested in slave labour assembling components.
They are not interested in rare species disappearing because their habitat became collateral damage in a supposedly noble cause.
They are interested in getting paid.
Short-sighted?
Absolutely.
Predictable?
Entirely.
But they are not the true villains of the story.
The real responsibility lies elsewhere.
The true architects of these disasters are the people who create the incentive structures in the first place.
The people who build systems that reward box-ticking rather than results.
The people who shower subsidies onto politically fashionable projects while insulating themselves from the consequences.
The people who transform public money into a feeding trough and then act shocked when an army of opportunists arrives for dinner.
Those are the individuals who rarely face scrutiny.
When the scheme eventually collapses, the project developers are dragged into public view.
The promoters are sacrificed.
The consultants disappear.
The investors nurse their losses.
The media discovers its outrage.
Everyone points fingers.
A few convenient scapegoats are selected and ceremonially thrown to the wolves.
And to be fair, many of them deserve it.
But the people who designed the game itself?
The people who created the rules?
The people who built the incentives that guaranteed exactly this outcome?
They usually walk away untouched.
Their fingerprints remain on every failed project, every wasted billion, every ruined landscape, every distorted market, and every broken promise.
Yet somehow accountability always stops one floor below their offices.
That is perhaps the most remarkable feature of modern governance.
We have become extraordinarily skilled at punishing those who exploit bad incentives.
We remain astonishingly reluctant to punish those who create them.
Until that changes, the cycle will continue.
The bait will be laid.
The feeding frenzy will begin.
The money will disappear.
The excuses will multiply.
And the architects of the next catastrophe will already be busy designing another billion-dollar trap.
https://www.masterresource.org/greenwishing/greenwishing-gall-short/