Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Thursday, March 7. 2019

QQQ


Robert Conquest's three laws of politics (reminded by AVI regarding the Girl Scouts):


1) Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2) Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3) The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.


Posted by Bird Dog in Quotidian Quotable Quote (QQQ) at 13:55 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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#2). In Washington it is called the Meg Greenfield Effect. Latest conquest: Chief Justice John Roberts. Sad!
#1 Stargazer on 2019-03-07 18:13 (Reply)
re 3) The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

So our Federal bureaucracy is behaving like it is run by its enemies?

No. I don't think so. That thinking is flat out wrong.
#2 feeblemind on 2019-03-08 11:38 (Reply)
No, but it is somewhat behaving like it is run by America's enemies.* Bureaucracies of all sorts support themselves, certainly.

The way the sentence is constructed, I think the sense is preserved if one considers "The United States of America" to be the organization in question. Its bureaucracy, much as the bureaucracies of the Girl Scouts or Church of England, work for itself but not for the supposed goals of the underlying organization.

*We're not fully there, yet, fortunately.
#2.1 Assistant Village Idiot on 2019-03-08 12:52 (Reply)

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