Work with Gary for More Community, Less Olympia

It occurs to me that, though I am gratified by the number of votes I received in the primary, we as voters, should  be cautious of new faces and new policies.  As conventional wisdom puts it, the devil we know may be better than the devil we don't. This is why we talk about unintended consequences of new laws.  We should take our time to test new faces and new policies before we implement them. For the rest of my campaign, I will concentrate on letting voters get to know me gradually over time, even with so little time left, so they can vote with me in confidence.

This gradual approach is the assumption on which all "conservative" philosophy is founded. New methods of governing, taxation, regulation should be viewed as inherently dangerous. "Progress" cannot be stopped, but new people and policies must prove themselves gradually over the time, ideally through the market process where people have a free choice about whether they want to be part of the experiment or not. Alternatively in small experiments rather than universally. Recent government activities in the economic arena (examples: credit cards, health care, housing, and financial regulation) are systematically exchanging known costs for unknowns costs that are proving to be much higher. The cure consistently proves worse than the disease. 

This article in WSJ about how government regulation caused the flash crash says it clearly:

In other words, we have traded cheaper up-front costs for unknown back-end ones.

The English statesman, Edmund Burke warned about this in the 19th century, after writing about the difference between the American revolution, which preserved as many social institutions as possible, and the French revolution, which destroyed all such institutions. Burke recognized existing institutions and policies to be ". . . the general bank and capital of nations and of ages."  28 An idea for change "is like a dangerous explosive which, handled cautiously, may be most beneficial, but if handled incautiously may blow up a civilization."  29