The beneficial effect of state intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and so to speak, visible, while its evil effects are gradual and indirect and lay out of sight ... Hence the majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favor upon governmental intervention.
Interpretation
State intervention in society has clear immediate benefits, but its negative consequences are often subtle and less visible.
The quote by A. V. Dicey reflects on how the effects of governmental intervention can create a bias in favor of such measures. While the positive impacts are readily observable and can be felt immediately, the contrary effects—often negative—tend to be slow-moving and obscure, leading people to overlook the potential drawbacks of increased government involvement in various societal aspects.
In practice
In a discussion about healthcare reforms, this quote could illustrate the tension between immediate benefits and long-term consequences.
Would you take a billion dollars, if as part of the deal the Earth were made uninhabitable a year after your death? ... well, of course not; you care about your friends, above all your children, any grandchildren. But ... what if the deal calls for the planet to be poisoned a thousand years later? We feel strong obligations to generations in the near future - should we not feel the same way about our children's great-grandchildren and generations beyond them?
He who seeks to regulate everything by law is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them. It is best to grant what cannot be abolished, even though it be in itself harmful. How many evils spring from luxury, envy, avarice, drunkenness and the like, yet these are tolerated because they cannot be prevented by legal enactments.
An object is not so attached to its name that we cannot find another one that would suit it better.
Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life; a man is not completely born till he has passed through death.
The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.
'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward.
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