20 Sep The slippery slope

As the US right hurls ever more fantastic slippery slope arguments at health care reform, the Atlantic’s James Fallows has challenged readers to come up with a single non-specious example of a metaphorical slippery slope. Aside from, “birth leads inevitably to death,” they’ve been pretty much stumped.

But one reader offered this 19th century advice from Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an Opium Eater.

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. Principiis obsta — that’s my rule.

For those unschooled in Latin, Fallows translates principiis obsta — resist the first inklings, nip it in the bud — as “the slippery-slope concept with a college degree.”

What bothers Contrarian about slippery slope arguments is that they always seem to be used as an excuse to avoid doing the right thing.