Leftist and communist governments usually fall prey to the law of unintended consequences. They try to fix something, only making it worse. The Great Society is a prime example. Joe Biden was a moderate hack most of his life. He threw in with leftism when he became Obama’s veep.

He now ostensibly runs a government filled with leftists, socialists, and likely many outright communists. Thus that law now applies to him. If leftists red history correctly it wouldn’t constantly kick them in the pants. As such, we recall the War on the Sparrows.

As part of Mao Zedong’s 1958 Communist Chinese Great Leap Forward campaign, from various sources, “Sparrows were suspected of consuming approximately four pounds of grain per sparrow per year. Sparrow nests were destroyed, eggs were broken, and chicks were killed. Millions of people organized into groups, and hit noisy pots and pans to prevent sparrows from resting in their nests, with the goal of causing them to drop dead from exhaustion. In addition to these tactics, citizens also simply shot the birds down from the sky. The campaign depleted the sparrow population, pushing it to near extinction.

By April 1960, Chinese leaders changed their opinion in part due to the influence of ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng who pointed out that sparrows ate a large number of insects, as well as grains. While the campaign was meant to increase yields, concurrent droughts and floods as well as the lacking sparrow population decreased rice yields. In the same month, Mao Zedong ordered the campaign against sparrows to end. Sparrows were replaced with bed bugs, as the extermination of sparrows had upset the ecological balance, which subsequently resulted in surging locust and insect populations that destroyed crops due to a lack of a natural predator.

With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides. Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine. The Chinese government eventually resorted to importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.”

Let’s recap: Sparrows are the alleged reason China suffers from famine. It’s certainly not socialist economics. So Mao orders them dead, forgetting they eat insects. With no sparrows, insects run wild and eat all the crops, thus making the famine worse. Eventually, they have to import sparrows to replace the ones they killed.

Here’s a modern equivalent: An economy is already hurting from COVID. So what does Joe Biden do, thinking he is repairing the economy? He taxes the economically successful, who would be the engine of any economic recovery because they have the capital to invest. He makes COVID restrictions more onerous, which fuels economic failure, and his tax and spend policies create rampant inflation. Like the War on the Sparrows, his bumbling methods only increase the problem he wanted to repair. Yup, unintended consequences, they’ll bite you every time. Especially, if you don’t heed history.