Most ruling class bureaucracies have one purpose. Grow their reach and budget. Not their responsibility or competence. The poster child for which is the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV). Seven people had to die expose their deliberate incompetence.
Related: 1,600 Massachusetts Drivers Have Their Licenses Suspended
Thousands of violations over years which should have resulted in license suspensions went ignored or unnoticed by Massachusetts bureaucrats. At least one of those cost seven Americans’ their lives.
The tragic deaths of seven people in New Hampshire have dominated the news for weeks. Mowed down by a Ukrainian man in a truck towing a trailer. The investigation has led to a not so startling discovery. Government bureaucracies suck and then people die.
Oops. Sorry about that. We’ll be sure to spend more money looking into it.
And they’ve been looking. Nothing gets public-union swamp rats moving like the threat of actual oversight. And so, far, after two months, the Massachusetts RMV has uncovered over 2000 cases that call for a license suspension.
The embattled agency on Wednesday announced in a memo that it has suspended an additional 869 registered Massachusetts drivers for serious driving infractions in other states that were never processed until now, bringing the total to more than 2,400.
The latest batch adds to the 1,607 suspensions the RMV announced last month after identifying 2,039 out-of-state notifications of violations that had previously gone unprocessed. Some drivers received multiple suspensions.
We have entire towns in New Hampshire with fewer licensed drivers than that.
In March, three months before the motorcycle crash, a state auditor had flagged nearly 13,000 notifications of out-of-state driving infractions that hadn’t been processed. But the auditor testified that she was told by a top RMV official that “nobody” was in charge of entering the backlog.
Not my Job
No one was in charge. Translation, that’s not my job.
It is not our intention to impugn all public employees. Some of them put the people’s business ahead of the union or themselves. But once again, we are reminded that the cancerous growth of government benefits no one but the individuals feeding off the taxpayers’ livelihood. And while necessary in some respects, most of what the state wants or tries to do would be better handled by more accountable interests competing for the work.
Instead, we get career bureaucrats who cry about pay and benefits – often better than those of us who pay for them. Many of whom from Massachusetts, have spent plenty of time in New Hampshire wearing shirts and holding signs for grow-government left-wing candidates and causes.
The Final Form of Big Gov
To discover the RMV’s deliberate incompetence ended lives within our borders is tragic. But not all that surprising. But how many others may have been injured or killed as a result of such incompetence? And never think for a moment this disease does not infect the public employees in your plucky little berg.
And understand that no one in that division will likely pay a criminal price for this incompetence. The people of Massachusetts will instead, be rewarded with a more extensive bureaucracy to keep an eye on the one that couldn’t be bothered to do its job. As if that won’t make matters worse.
