LAWS OF CONSERVATION: Tuesday night's Illinois senate debate reminds, once again, of Frederic Bastiat's description of the State as that grand fiction by which each attempts to live off the other. The challenger, a Pach, took the incumbent, a Donk, to task for failing to bring money back from Washington. The incumbent took the opportunity to note that when it came to getting funding for Illinois projects, there was no partisanship: the entire Illinois delegation, House and Senate, Donks and Pachs, met once a week for that purpose. Nobody was rude enough to point out that if you send money to Washington, and use some of it to run the national government, and use some of it to secure the borders and hunt terrorists, there would not be enough left to make sure that each state got more in grants than it paid in taxes. I should be encouraged, I supposed, that nobody viewed government borrowing as a way out.