day no. 17,165: solutions and trade-offs

“When you pass something like the Patriot Act, with much fanfare, in order to enable patriots to spy on the bad guys, what winds up happening is that the act is used to enable bad guys to spy on patriots.” — Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

You should never sign into law something you would not want your enemies to use against you. If you think a certain rule change would benefit you now, keep in mind it might not later and if you are the one who signed it into law, you are the one who made it possible for your enemies to thrive in the future when it benefits them more than it does you. Do not be so short-sighted as to profit off of a short-term rule change that long-term may tip the scales in the other direction.

Principles cannot change. Practices can. If you pass a law that gives you the right to practice something that ultimately goes against your core principles, you should not be shocked to discover that it is later used in practice to attack your principles.

"There are no solutions, only trade-offs." — Thomas Sowell

If you think like a liberal in terms of solutions, you will cause more trouble than you fix when you pass your conservative-approved bills, but if you think like a conservative, you will want to reduce the number of laws and legislative actions to a minimum in order to keep government small and limited so that all men may live in peace and quiet without having to deal with more state interference of any kind... even yours.