It’s not uncommon for right-of-center political commentators to discuss unintended consequences. In this venue, you’ll often find references to Bastiat‘s discussion of what is seen and what is unseen, a discussion that served as a basic building block for Henry Hazlitt‘s famous book Economics In One Lesson.

The references usually refer to the negative unintended consequences that flow from well-intentioned public policy decisions. But there’s another side to the coin: positive unintended consequences that flow from negative actions. For example, consider how much more quickly non-English-speaking immigrants to the United States learned English in years past — or at least took great pains to ensure that their children spoke English — because of the taunts or abuse from their native neighbors. There’s no reason to praise the neighbors, and there’s no reason to believe those neighbors had any good intentions when they picked on immigrants for their poor grasp of English. Yet their bad conduct had the positive impact of assimilating families more quickly into American society.

Jeremy Rozansky offers another example of this phenomenon in a review for the latest Commentary magazine of Nicholas Eberstadt’s new book, A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic.

One of the antidotes to dependency has been a culture that rejects dependency as ignoble, but it seems we have undercut this cultural inclination because of a desire not to stigmatize or judge the poor. Food stamps used to be recognizable, larger than cash and a bit more garish; now they look like credit cards, and their users feel little or no discomfort while using them. Not coincidentally, since the introduction of the new food-stamp system, their usage has greatly expanded. Likewise, men who would once have been ashamed to be on the dole increasingly take advantage of loosely enforced federal disability benefits. More than 8 million Americans younger than 65 elect to go on federal disability programs, citing vague categories such as “mood disorders” and musculoskeletal problems at higher rates than ever before.

The desire not to judge or stigmatize the poor is noble. But it does have consequences that can be counterproductive.