All of this conservative reform stuff put this question in my head. Who do you side with:
FDR who said:
Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Or Edmund Burke who said:
“I must bear with infirmities until they fester into crimes.”
I’m with Burke (though I sort of dread quoting Burke these days because Yuval’s got it all over me in Burke-o-phillic geekdom.
Update: I liked this from a reader:
How about HHS v American Red Cross?
I take American Red Cross.
And then there’s this from C.S. Lewis, via a reader:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.