Guess what blatant reactionary wrote the following words: “It seems plausible to wonder if government can build a nation abroad, fight social decay, run schools, mandate the design of cars, run health insurance exchanges, or set proper sexual harassment policies on college campuses, if it can’t even fix a 232-foot bridge competently.”
Stumped? The answer is Lawrence Summers, secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, presidential senior economic adviser in the Obama administration and, in between, president of Harvard, writing in the Washington Post. For more on the fiasco of the rebuilding of the Larz Anderson Bridge, between Cambridge and Boston’s Allston neighborhood, see another opinion article by Summers in the Boston Globe.
As it happens, I wrote a column myself back in 2010 on how long it was taking to fix the Humpback Bridge,
a portion of George Washington Parkway which rises about 30 feet above an inlet of the Potomac. From the top of that bridge you can see the Pentagon, still the world’s largest office building, which was built in 18 months. I’ve had occasion also to write columns on how excellent books by Philip K. Howard, Peter Schuck and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge which illustrate that, as I put it, “gummit don’t work good.” And I’ve written more recently on the tragic deterioration of the Metro, Washington’s “Great Society Subway.”
So even as we hear from Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton how government is going to painlessly provide us with free healthcare, free college and free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (uh, just kidding about the last one), we see all around us how government is unable to do things it could easily do 50, 100 and (think Flint water) 150 years ago. What makes anyone think it can take on additional tasks and perform them satisfactorily? Apparently Summers, lifelong Democrat and frequent advocate of more government spending on infrastructure, is having his doubts.
I keep saying that a very limited Government should ONLY concentrates on the core functions for that level – and do them exceedingly well. In the software world, we talk about
- “software bloat” (marketeers and sales dopes constantly wanting a given software package to do more and more)
- “spaghetti code” (code that was once small, fast, and efficient (in a word, elegant) that is now humongous, sufficiently slow so as to require more power hardware (see #1) and nigh on impossible to maintain due to the contortions and “bolt-ons” to the original code that render it stupifying.
Code like this has lost sight of its original purpose…and users finally figure it out and give up (generally well after the coders have seen it and left for safer ground because they know the financial tsunami that is heading into that company’s beach).
This is now the state of the Federal Government – it does too many things at too high a cost with far too many procedures and policies that have given us the situation that we no longer really know how many departments, bureaus, commissions, and committees actually exist but churn out unlegislated laws and regulations that stifle not just government itself but we in the private sector.
It has lost sight of it’s original purpose – to protect our Individual liberties – in its own bloat and stale pasta. Instead, the bureaucracies and politicians all protect themselves.
And then they wonder why this election cycle has played out the way it has? It’s simple: they are no longer public servants but think more highly of themselves than they ought to and the “folk” are starting to tell them exactly that.
(H/T: Washington Examiner)
