Don Boudreaux has a great op-ed about how politicians harm people without really realizing it:

Consider agricultural subsidies. They harm millions of people. Consumers pay unnecessarily higher prices for food while taxpayers dole out more wealth to support these programs. The higher prices and taxes, in turn, leave fewer resources available to produce other goods and services.

Subsidies make us poorer.

Most politicians know that subsidies harm the public. Yet there’s no end in sight to such wasteful programs.

Some observers argue that politicians are inherently evil. While I agree that representative democracy selects for office persons who are unusually hungry for power, I don’t believe that politicians’ character flaws are chiefly responsible for the interest-group feeding frenzy that today characterizes democratic government.

Few politicians are indifferent to human suffering. Most politicians have loving and beloved families and dear friends; these officials wouldn’t dream of mistreating people they deal with personally. This is why nearly every politician can look with a straight face into a camera and insist that he or she is a good person who only wants to do what’s right.

Nevertheless, politicians do many harmful things. The reason is that the ill effects of most political acts are revealed to politicians only in the form of statistics, charts and graphs. But such figures are faceless, bloodless. They are to politicians what little puffs of smoke are to bombers: Bombers know that tremendous human suffering occurs just beneath the puffs of smoke but because the bombers don’t encounter this suffering up close, they are largely unaffected by it.

It’s just not real to the officials who cause it. Likewise, statistics, charts and graphs seldom produce remorse or regret for politicians. It’s relatively easy to harm others when you never see your victims’ faces.