“Everything works fine at first—credit cards, public schools, feminism—because human nature has not been kicking in long enough. The trouble starts when we try to make a basically good idea work for everybody, everywhere, all the time, until the good idea crumbles under the weight put on it and becomes a bad idea."

King's example:

(“In the years before World War One, Henry Ford astounded the nation when he announced that he would pay his workers five dollars a day, a munificent wage for the time. His intention was to attract and keep the cream of loyal hard workers. It worked fine at first, until the unions reasoned that if bosses would volunteer to pay high wages, think what could be gotten out of them by force. To that end they upped their demands to outrageous levels over the years; more and more raises, benefits, overtime, holidays, rest periods, and bonuses, until the American autoworker was the envy of the blue-collar world. Now he works at Wal-Mart because he priced himself out of the market.”)
Florence King