So they're planning a system of toll plazas on our nation's highways.

[woo me with science]

132. There is always a "good reason."

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone, you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
~Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)


Other recent examples:

Now it's supposedly about child pornography (internet control)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002197126

and databases on everyone to protect us from illegal workers.

"regretful" signing of the NDAA