Nothing Is So Permanent As A

This maxim appears in Tyranny of the Status Quo (1984), co-authored with Rose Friedman, which analyzed why beneficial reforms are so difficult to sustain after initial passage. Friedman argued that temporary emergency measures — wartime price controls, "interim" agencies, crisis-response programs — routinely outlast their justifications because the bureaucracies and constituencies they create have strong incentives to perpetuate them. He saw this as a structural problem of democratic governance, not merely a failure of political will.