 once a principle has been breeched, even to a small degree, it becomes increasingly easy — easy and then easier and easier and easier — for that principle to be breeched again and again, more and more. So that you soon hear people saying: “What do you mean, government can’t legitimately restrict an individual’s freedom of action, or expropriate her property? Certainly they can. Governments do it all the time, and they’ve been doing it for decades. Look at military conscription — the draft — or look at 1913, when the Federal Reserve was created and then, that same year, laws came into being which passed the national income tax, which is certainly a type of expropriation, and then Herbert Hoover and his passage of Smoot–Hawley, which of course paved way for the New Deal, with all its price and wage controls, and then Social Security, which was meant to be temporary, and then Medicare and Medicaid and then TARP, followed by Barack Obama’s trillion-dollar ‘stimulus,’ whose thousands of pages nobody read in full before it was rammed through and made into the law of the land, and then his taxpayer-funded bailouts and his taxpayer subsidizations of ‘renewables’ and then Obamacare. Why should Donald Trump’s new laws be any different?”
Thus are new laws endlessly enacted, and endlessly justified. And then one day, freedom is gone, and nobody quite knows how. Or cares.