12 October 2008
K Myers on bureaucrats
These are happy hunting times for the left, as they exult in the calamity that has befallen the unregulated US banking system, and cry for the restoration of good old fashioned rules: Regulation Once Again!
Now look, I understand finance much as I do the mathematics which govern thermonuclear reactions in the heart of the planet Mercury: but I think I know something about the bureaucratic mind.
Nobody ever became a bureaucrat because they were pioneers, frontiersmen, risk-takers: no, the forefathers of bureaucrats were the last men down from the trees, long after the women and children had strangled the last man-eating baboons and throttled the final sabre-toothed tiger.
The bureaucrats' idea of pleasure is obstruction, which no doubt reflects the working of their blocked but gaseous bowels -- and their paradise is in the creation of rules which they alone understand.
Kevin Myers, Irish Independent
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