The commonest error of politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.
Over the years, so many exceptions and amendments were made to China's one-child policy that it was hard to pinpoint a moment to pronounce it dead.
The more guidance a central bank can provide the public about how policy is likely to evolve the greater the chance that market participants will make appropriate inferences.
In this constantly evolving world, Congress must be a good steward of policy to ensure our laws at least keep pace.
You don't have to keep looking at the future foreign policy in terms, simply, of the past.
No country's policies are eternal; they do vary. People are growing old, and a new generation is coming to power. In a year's time, a government can look different. You can't influence them if you don't talk to them.
Can old dogs learn new tricks? …. Issue positions among partisans tend to be relatively stable… Party position changes tend to come not from learning new tricks but from electing new dogs.
In all great changes of established governments, forms ought to give way to substance
There have been waves of reform in the past. I see no reason why they wouldn't happen again.
All we can hope for is that the thing is going to slowly and imperceptibly shift. All I can say is that 50 years ago there were no such thing as environmental policies.
Social Security is a plan that actually was designed in a much different time, in a different era, and with a different set of American demographics in mind.
What worries me is that conservative thought is moving quickly, but we're kind of the pachyderms in Congress because things move so slowly.
It is often the case that laws must change before fears about change dissipate.
Laws are the DNA of government. They must evolve with time.
There is no such thing as a fixed policy, because policy like all organic entities is always in the making.
If Rand Paul is going to go anywhere, he is going to have to expand it beyond merely this argument about where we put troops and don't put troops and make it both a generational argument and a change argument. And he's got a chance to do that.
We have come a long way in terms of foreign policy.
I think, there is a possibility - I would say it's more than that - that we will come to a view of foreign policy going forward that learns from the past but doesn't get captured by it.
The only thing that's consistent in politics is change.
You cannot be a party in stagnation. You have to have the constant reinvigoration of fresher ideas and the debate in terms of role of government and the rest is as ancient as - as old as America.
