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3 of 6,095 quotations related to Public Policy Keyword: Help with searching Sowell, Thomas No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with? Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized. What is politically defined as economic 'planning' is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by government officials.