Nobody asked but …
If you increase a thing recursively (for instance, government bureaucracy), you can make it both larger and more complex. You can make it so that only its denizens can operate it. Only bees can operate a hive. Only bees understand their hierarchy. There is no effective way for an outsider to influence what is going on. Remember, a honey gatherer, or even an apiologist, is part of the system — just as lobbyists, rentseekers, and pundits are part of the political system.
Politicians, and their minions (bureaucrats, lobbyists, rentseekers, pundits, and all other saprophytes) are at work 24/7/365 to make the state like the pencil (refer here to Leonard E Read’s I, Pencil). They are working non-stop to make the state a beehive that only a god could understand.
The principle dodge of the politician is to promise some fundamental change in this kaleidoscopic mess. She knows that it will be like a rock tossed into a scum-choked pond; the stone will disappear, the ripples will be dampened by the reprehensible top-layer, and the scum will heal itself. It is as simple as the traditional warning of “don’t try to fight city hall!”
I heard a Senator, this weekend, explaining away a physical attack of an officeholder against a reporter, by reversing field, deflecting the talk to a generic defense of the First Amendment — a rather garbled version, as it turns out. It is a sickness, but their minds are engaged in the constant design of dodges to avoid the responsibility of serving anybody, but themselves and their patrons, in any way.
— Kilgore Forelle
