Many enablers operate from the premise that another little bit won't "cost much" and will have observable benefits (for a particular interest group). Voters, the ultimate enablers, fall for that line and ignore or forget the slippery slope and the ratchet effect:
Other enablers -- namely, politicians, their hangers-on, and the more sophisticated beneficiaries of their largesse -- have simpler and more cynical motives: to impose their will on others (power) and/or to profit from the exercise (theft).[O]nce a polity becomes accustomed to relying on the state for a particular thing that could be done better through private action, it becomes easier for that polity to ask the state to do other things that could be done better through private action....
[And a]s people become accustomed to a certain level of state action, they take that level as a given. Those who question it are labeled "radical thinkers" and "out of the mainstream." The "mainstream" -- having taken it for granted that the state should "do something" -- argues mainly about how much more it should do and how it should do it, with cost as an afterthought.
The excuses of "compassion," "fairness," and "consumer protection" are rationalizations for power-lust and theft. The powerful can sustain their power -- and thus feed their power-lust -- only through (legalized) theft. Power-lust is raison d'être of the insatiable state; theft is its inevitable modus operandi.
