Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Delong:
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There is one good conservative idea out there which will never become liberal: Avoidance of the law of unintended consequences.
Liberals tinker, and with tinkering comes more tinkering. That's not a criticism. They seem to believe intervention is the best initial approach. If it doesn't work, or it causes a problem, it can be cured with further interventions.
Hence we have pages of rules, laws, regulations, etc. that could loop the world a dozen times.
Conservatives are greedy pricks a lot of the time, and they're too reactionary, allowing themselves to be defined not by what they stand for, but what they oppose (even if they originally wrote it). But they do inject a necessary wisdom... The intellectually honest of them question the ripple's effects before chucking the stone in the pond.
Of course, the intellectually honest wing of conservatism is maybe 20% of them, so this comment is even more academic than usual. (And the hypocrites comprising 80% of the party throw conservative caution out the window on matters like the Iraq intervention and conservative use of the environment.) But that 20% does serve a noble purpose. Somebody has to say, "'Embracing complexity' breeds endless complexity...
and here's where endless complexity ends."
