Incompetent Government Quotes

Support for the arts -- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

The majority of problems on this planet are the result of the idea that humans are not sovereign and autonomous, but property owned by primitive Gods and incompetent governments.

Corrupt and incompetent police officers have a long history of being protected by their colleagues, police internal affairs and the government.

Producing laws is not an easier job than producing cars and food, so if the government is incompetent to produce cars or food, why do you expect it to do a good job producing the legal system within which you are then going to produce the cars and the food?

You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government. You get that alternative and you'll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again... my asset values will disappear, my apartments will be worth a fraction of what they were, my ministers' jobs will be in peril, their security will be at risk and their women will become maids in other people's countries, foreign workers. I cannot have that!" - Justifying million-dollar pay hike for Singapore ministers

Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to more [than] a very limited extent.

Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility - for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.

Radical individualism, radical egalitarianism, omnipresent and omni-incompetent government, the politicization of the culture, and the battle for advantages through politics shatter a society into fragments of isolated individuals and angry groups.

Worse than a corrupt government is an incompetent one, not least because having the second characteristic does not exclude the first one.

This last is important. Even in corporate environments, it is very difficult to remove an underling for incompetence if that underling has seniority and a long history of good performance reviews. As in government bureaucracies, the easiest way to deal with such people is often to “kick them upstairs”: promote them to a higher post, where they become somebody else’s problem.

As opposition leader, [Stephen Harper] wrote in the Montreal Gazette in the year before he came to power: 'Information is the lifeblood of a democracy. Without adequate access to key information about government policies and programs, citizens and parliamentarians cannot make informed decisions and incompetent or corrupt governments can be hidden under a cloak of secrecy.' When he became prime minister, his attitude appeared to undergo a shift of considerable proportions. It often took the Conservatives twice as long as previous governments to handle access requests. Sometimes it took six months to a year.

[I]f the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded.

I know the word "incompetent" from my father. He uses it when there's something political on TV, or when he and Uncle Miki are quarreling about something political they've seen on TV. Incompetence means doing something even though you haven't the faintest idea how to--like governing Yugoslavia, for instance.

Professor Mises has keenly pointed out the paradox of interventionists who insist that consumers are too ignorant or incompetent to buy products intelligently, while at the same time proclaiming the virtues of democracy, where the same people vote for or against politicians whom they do not know and on policies which they scarcely understand. To put it another way, the partisans of intervention assume that individuals are not competent to run their own affairs or to hire experts to advise them, but also assume that these same individuals are competent to vote for these experts at the ballot box. They are further assuming that the mass of supposedly incompetent consumers are competent to choose not only those who will rule over themselves, but also over the competent individuals in society. Yet such absurd and contradictory assumptions lie at the root of every program for “democratic” intervention in the affairs of the people.12

The subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: It leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.

I think the government is incompetent, not evil.

Self Government by extravagance and incompetence brings its own end.

A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

Support for the arts—merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

A woefully corrupt and incompetent government is only a problem to the taxpayer.

Our government has worked hard in showing people that their core values is laziness, incompetence and corruption. They are willing to stick to that standard and are applying , in all the departments.

A democratic state begins from the assumption that most of those who gravitate toward power are mediocre and probably immoral. It assumes that we must always protect ourselves from bad government. We must be prepared for the worst leaders even as we hope for the best. And as Karl Popper wrote, this understanding leads to a new approach to power, for "it forces us to replace the question: Who shall rule? By the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?

Jubal shrugged. "Abstract design is all right-for wall paper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation. . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce- render emotional-his audience, each time. These ladies who won't deign to do that- and perhaps can't- of course lost the public. If they hadn't lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because the ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for 'art' that leaves him unmoved- if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes or such." "You know, Jubal, I've always wondered why i didn't give a hoot for paintings or statues- but I thought it was something missing in me, like color blindness." "Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art, just as you must know French to read a story printed in French. But in general terms it's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code like Pepys and his diary. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn. . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything- obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence. Ben, would you call me an artists?” “Huh? Well, I’ve never thought about it. You write a pretty good stick.” “Thank you. ‘Artist’ is a word I avoid for the same reasons I hate to be called ‘Doctor.’ But I am an artist, albeit a minor one. Admittedly most of my stuff is fit to read only once… and not even once for a busy person who already knows the little I have to say. But I am an honest artist, because what I write is consciously intended to reach the customer… reach him and affect him, if possible with pity and terror… or, if not, at least to divert the tedium of his hours with a chuckle or an odd idea. But I am never trying to hide it from him in a private language, nor am I seeking the praise of other writers for ‘technique’ or other balderdash. I want the praise of the cash customer, given in cash because I’ve reached him- or I don’t want anything. Support for the arts- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore! Damn it, you punched one of my buttons. Let me fill your glass and you tell me what is on your mind.

In his theory Perrow recognized that modern systems are made up of thousands of parts, including fallible human decision makers, which interrelate in ways that are, like Laplace´s atoms, impossible to track and anticipate individually. Yet one can bet on the fact that just as atoms executing a drunkard´s walk will eventually get somewhere, so too will accidents eventually occur. Called normal accident theory, Perrow´s doctrine describes how that happens – how accidents can occur without clear causes, without those glaring errors and incompetent villains sought by corporate or government commission.

What I do know, from years of reporting, is that ignorance, incompetence and fear so often go hand in hand with governments that none of us should be surprised if the institutions we thought would keep us safe, would in fact be woefully inadequate in the face of a pandemic.

if Clinton was taken prisoner “it would be our misfortune, since the British government could not find another commander so incompetent to send in his place.

It’s disheartening to discover government corruption and incompetence, for example; but is it better not to know about it? Whose interest does ignorance serve?

The misfortune of the world is that people who are too incompetent to be managers even in an apartment block come to the top management of the countries!

government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

You are governed by incompetents.

We imagine the villains of history as masterminds of horror. This happens because we learn about them from history books, which weave narratives that retrospectively imbue events with logic, making them seem predetermined. Historians and their readers bring an unavoidable perception bias to the story: if a historical event caused shocking destruction, then the person behind this event must have been a correspondingly giant monster. Terrifying as it is to contemplate the catastrophes of the twentieth century, it would be even more frightening to imagine that humanity had stumbled unthinkingly into its darkest moments. But a reading of contemporaneous accounts will show that both Hitler and Stalin struck many of their countrymen as men of limited ability, education, and imagination—and, indeed, as being incompetent in government and military leadership. Contrary to popular wisdom, they were not political savants, possessed of one extraordinary talent that brought them to power. It was, rather, the blunt instrument of reassuring ignorance that propelled their rise in a frighteningly complex world.

George Bernard Shaw once said: “Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.” When liberals make the argument that capitalism is the cause of all of our problems, they are either speaking out of abject ignorance or being totally disingenuous to protect their own political interests. We have not had true free-market capitalism in this country on any wide scale. Where we have had economic successes in this nation’s history, it has been those times when people have done something outside of the government’s involvement. Every single time the federal government has been involved, it has created chaos, waste, and corruption. The historical record is overwhelmingly one of gross incompetence.

When I see the promotion of nighttime street lighting to the masses, I realize the great level of incompetence that is present in governments, human health and the biological effects of light.

He’s ruined that magic,” this aide said of Trump. “The disdain he shows for our country’s foundation and its principles. The disregard he has for right and wrong. Your fist clenches. Your teeth grate. The hair goes up on the back of your neck. I have to remind myself I said an oath to a document in the National Archives. I swore to the Constitution. I didn’t swear an oath to this jackass.” As this aide saw it, there has been a silent understanding within the national security community that diplomatic, military, and intelligence officers were doing the right thing, quietly risking their lives to protect the American way of life. This aide saw Trump’s move against Brennan as one of the first steps of undercutting America’s democratic system of government and the belief system upon which it was founded. According to the aide, it was the president declaring, “It’s not okay to disagree with me. I can remove you from this work and your career. “If he wanted to, how far could he push this?” this aide asked. “Look back. Did people in the 1930s in Germany know when the government started to turn on them? Most Americans are more worried about who is going to win on America’s Got Talent and what the traffic is going to be like on I-95. They aren’t watching this closely. “I like to believe [Trump] is too self-engrossed, too incompetent and disorganized to get us to 1930,” this aide added. “But he has moved the bar. And another president that comes after him can move it a little farther. The time is coming. Our nation will be tested. Every nation is. Rome fell, remember. He is opening up vulnerabilities for this to happen. That is my fear.” —

I dread having to call the police, as I have no idea if they will send good cop, bad cop, lying cop, incompetent cop, aggressive cop, assaulting cop, corrupt cop, or the worst one of them all, the terminator cop.

The old man replied, gravely: “The police, my dear boy, is the most incompetent thing on this earth, and government the feeblest in all matters concerning individuals. Neither the police nor the government can read hearts.

If the agenda in a country is constantly changing, sometimes even hourly, you must know that you are governed by ignorant and incompetent! And perhaps worse, you are run by traitors who only serve foreign country interests!

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism. We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into demanding political solutions to social problems. To demand help from officials we rather despise argues for a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of eras past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to take over the risks of our everyday life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded to politicians seeking to bribe us with such promises with derision. Today, the demos votes for them.

The government’s response to the Irish potato blight of the 1840s, which caused around 1 million Irish people to die of starvation or disease and another million to emigrate, was incompetent and indifferent when it was not cruel.

The U.S. government, contending that many Osage were unable to handle their money, had required the Office of Indian Affairs to determine which members of the tribe it considered capable of managing their trust funds. Over the tribe’s vehement objections, many Osage, including Lizzie and Anna, were deemed “incompetent,” and were forced to have a local white guardian overseeing and authorizing all of their spending, down to the toothpaste they purchased at the corner store.

Undoubtedly street blockades and other forms of confrontational opposition can be very useful against any political opponent, but once far-right formations have managed to broadcast their xenophobic, dystopian platforms, it is incumbent upon us to drown them out with even better alternatives to the austerity and incompetence of the governing parties of the Right & Left. On its own, militant anti-fascism is necessary but not sufficient to build a new world in the shell of the old.

New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh. I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains. Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College--you know, home of the "Fighting Christies"--and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," has a law school. And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix. Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? On hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we've gone from "we the people" to "up with people." From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by elites. It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.

Half of the biggest American companies of 1980 have now disappeared by take-over or bankruptcy; half of today’s biggest companies did not even exist in 1980. The same is not true of government monopolies: the Internal Revenue Service and the National Health Service will not die, however much incompetence they might display. Yet most anti-corporate activists have faith in the good will of the leviathans that can force you to do business with them, but are suspicious of the behemoths that have to beg for your business. I find that odd. Moreover,

The federal bureaucracy is committed to one thing: making sure they keep their own jobs, even though they don’t do them. The larger the bureaucracy, the more corrupt and incompetent it becomes. The losers are those poor people who must turn to the federal government for what they need.

Dr. Peter observed that one reason so many employees are incompetent is that the skills required to get a job often have nothing to do with what is required to do the job itself. The skills required to run a great political campaign have little to do with the skills required to govern.

For several Roman observers, senatorial weakness for bribery was one major factor lying behind their failure: ‘Rome’s a city for sale and bound to fall as soon as it finds a buyer’, as Jugurtha was supposed to have quipped when he left the city. The general incompetence of the governing class was another.

Decried every day as a feckless thing without initiative or ambition, a thing not to be mentioned in the same breath as private enterprise, government became that thing. First sequester its responsibilities, sell off its functions, grant it no respect; run it into the ground and then declare it incompetent.

(“We live in a world in which relatively few people—maybe 500 or 1,000—make the important decisions”—Philip B. Heymann of Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times, April 21, 1995.) Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to more [than] a very limited extent.

I propose another explanation: The reason so many Americans have become alienated from government since the poll of 1964 is that government really has become more incompetent and really has become alienated from the public it is supposed to serve. Political cycles and political fashion have nothing to do with it. American government isn’t what it used to be.

This is because the outcomes of life are not governed by passion; they are governed by principle. You may not think what you did this morning was important, but it was. You may not think that the little things add up, but they do. Consider the age-old brainteaser: Would you rather have $1 million in hand today or a penny that doubles in value every day for the next month? The $1 million right now sounds great, but after a 31-day month, that one penny would be worth over $10 million. Making big, sweeping changes is not difficult because we are flawed, incompetent beings. It’s difficult because we are not meant to live outside of our comfort zones. If you want to change your life, you need to make tiny, nearly undetectable decisions every hour of every day until those choices are habituated. Then you’ll just continue to do them. If you want to spend less time on your phone, deny yourself the chance to check it one time today. If you want to eat healthier, drink half a cup of water today. If you want to sleep more, go to bed 10 minutes earlier tonight than you did last night. If you want to exercise more, do it now for just 10 minutes. If you want to read, read one page. If you want to meditate, do so for 30 seconds. Then keep doing those things. Do them every single day. You’ll get used to not checking your phone. You’ll want more water, and you’ll drink more water. You’ll run for 10 minutes, and you won’t feel like you have to stop, so you won’t. You’ll read one page, grow interested, and read another. At our most instinctive, physiological level, “change” translates to something dangerous and potentially life-threatening. No wonder why we build our own cages and stay in them, even though there’s no lock on the door. Trying to shock yourself into a new life isn’t going to work, and that’s why it hasn’t yet.

Even if popular culture has long enjoyed turning him into an object of mockery, we still tend to believe that the Nazi machine was ruthlessly efficient, and that the great dictator spent most of his time...well, dictating things. So it’s worth remembering that Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show. In fact, this may even have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies. He was a “pathetic dunderhead” according to one magazine editor; another wrote that his party was a “society of incompetents” and that people should not “overestimate the fairground party.

Democracies, as we know, are prone to every error from incompetence and corruption to misguided fetishes and gridlock. Therefore, it is astonishing, in a sense, that we would be willing to submit the direction of our societies to the collective wisdom of an imperfect and frequently disengaged public. How could we be so naïve? To that fair question, we must reply: how could anyone be so gullible as permanently to entrust power—an inherently corrupting force—to a single leader or party? When a dictator abuses his authority, there is no legal way to stop him. When a free society falters, we still have the ability--through open debate and the selection of new leaders--to remedy those shortcomings. We still have time to pick a better egg. That is democracy's comparative advantage, and it should be recognized and preserved.

Until you can function as a competent member of the group and carry your own weight, you are a supplicant and a drag on the collective. A child is a child, but an incompetent adult is a beggar. One of the problems with massive welfare states is that they make children or beggars of us all, and as such are an affront and a barrier to adult masculinity. It has become clichéd comedy for men and women to laugh at men who are concerned with being competent. The “men refuse to stop and ask for directions” joke never seems to get old for women, who are more comfortable with dependence, or socialist types, because reducing men to a childlike state of supplication and submission to state bureaucrats is required for big-government welfare states to function. Masculine loathing of dependence is a bulwark to the therapeutic mother state.

With a few notable exceptions, state and local government officials had completely failed to do their jobs. Official incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, neglect, and the desire to protect abortion from a harsh spotlight whatever the cost caused needless deaths and injuries. The grand jury's conclusion was damning: Kermit Gosnell murdered and maimed with impunity for thirty years because virtually no one did his job properly.

He lacks any shred of human decency, humility or caring,” the former White House official wrote of the man he had served for more than a year. “He is morally bankrupt, breathtakingly dishonest, lethally incompetent, and stunningly ignorant of virtually anything related to governing, history, geography, human events or world affairs. He is a traitor and a malignancy in our nation and represents a clear and present danger to our democracy and the rule of law.

The decision by the ruling elites in ancient Rome—dominated by a bloated military and a corrupt oligarchy, much like the United States—to strangle the vain and idiotic Emperor Commodus in his bath in the year 192 did not halt the growing chaos and precipitous decline of the Roman Empire. Commodus, like a number of late-Roman emperors, and like Trump, was incompetent and consumed by his own vanity. He commissioned innumerable statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He used his position as head of state to make himself the star of his own ongoing public show. He fought victoriously as a gladiator in the arena in fixed bouts. Power for Commodus, as it is for Trump, was primarily about catering to his bottomless narcissism. He sold public offices to the ancient equivalents of Betsy DeVos and Steven Mnuchin. Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax, the Bernie Sanders of his day, who attempted in vain to curb the power of the Praetorian Guards, the ancient version of the military-industrial complex. The Praetorian Guards assassinated Pertinax three months after he became emperor. The Guards then auctioned off his position to the highest bidder. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted sixty-six days. There would be five emperors in AD 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus. Trump and our decaying empire have ominous historical precedents.

On September 11, it was government that failed. Law enforcement agencies didn't detect the plot. The FBI had reports that said young men on the terrorist watch list were going from flight school to flight school, trying to find an instructor who would teach them how to fly a commercial jet. But the FBI never acted on it. The INS let the hijackers in. Three of them had expired visas. Months after the attack, the government issued visas to two dead hijackers. The solution to such government incompetence is to give the government more power? Congress could have done what Amsterdam, Belfast, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Paris, and Rome did: set tough standards and let private companies compete to meet them. Many of those cities switched to private companies because they realized government-run security wasn't working very well. Private-sector competition keeps the screeners alert because the airport can fire them. No one can fire the government; that's a reason government agencies gradually deteriorate. There's no competition.

Ethnic pandering may improve the political lot of statist politicians looking for electoral advantage, it may serve the interests of self-appointed leaders of ethnic groups promoting balkanization and demographic advantage, and it may help incompetent foreign governments that prefer exporting their next generation to the United States rather than reforming their regimes and economic systems, but it certainly is not pursued in the best interests of America’s children and future generations, whose well-being is rarely considered in the making of these decisions.

… they are beating their brains out against one of the foundation rocks of our national character itself. Which is the premise that politics and political office are not and never have been the method and means by which we can govern ourselves in peace and dignity and honor and security, but instead are our national refuge for our incompetents who have failed at every other occupation by means of which they might make a living for themselves and their families; and whom as a result we would have to feed and clothe and shelter out of our own private purses and means.

Let us admit that some government programs and personnel are efficient and effective, and others are not. Let us acknowledge that when it comes to the treatment of children, some individuals are evil, neglectful, or incompetent, but others are trying to do the best they can against daunting odds and deserve not our contempt but the help only we—through our government—can provide. Let us stop stereotyping government and individuals as absolute villains or absolute saviors, and recognize that each must be part of the solution. Let us use government, as we have in the past, to further the common good.

Who were these leaders? What was the strength of the storm troops they were throwing into the streets? And what exactly were they up to? I worked long hours those first weeks in Paris to try to find out. It was not easy. Even the government and the police, as the rioting grew day after day, seemed to be ignorant and confused about the forces opposing them. The origins of these forces went back much farther than I had suspected. As early as 1926, when the franc had fallen to new lows and the government was facing bankruptcy, Ernest Mercier, the electricity magnate, had founded an antiparliamentarian movement called Redressement Français (French Resurgence). Its message was that a parliament of politicians was incompetent to handle the affairs of state in the complicated postwar world, where the intricacies of national and international business and finance called for specialized knowledge. It wanted a parliament and government of “technicians” who knew how modern capitalist society functioned, and it assured the country that the great business and financial enterprises could furnish these trained men. In other words, it wanted its own men to control directly what up to now they controlled only indirectly. Mercier saw in Mussolini’s corporate state a form in which his aims could be realized. Gradually he built up a following among his fellow magnates. Together they dispensed millions propagating their ideas.

The U.S. government, contending that many Osage were unable to handle their money, had required the Office of Indian Affairs to determine which members of the tribe it considered capable of managing their trust funds. Over the tribe’s vehement objections, many Osage, including Lizzie and Anna, were deemed “incompetent,” and were forced to have a local white guardian overseeing and authorizing all of their spending, down to the toothpaste they purchased at the corner store. One Osage who had served in World War I complained, “I fought in France for this country, and yet I am not allowed even to sign my own checks.” The guardians were usually drawn from the ranks of the most prominent white citizens in Osage County.

Trust at the interpersonal level. Trustworthiness is the foundation of trust. Trust is the emotional bank account between two people that enables them to have a win-win performance agreement. If two people trust each other, based on the trustworthiness of each other, they can then enjoy clear communication, empathy, synergy, and productive interdependency. If one is incompetent, training and development can help. But if one has a character flaw, he or she must make and keep promises to increase internal security, improve skills, and rebuild relationships of trust. Trust—or the lack of it—is at the root of success or failure in relationships and in the bottom-line results of business, industry, education, and government.

I have always felt, in the many years that I have observed him, that Modi’s ambitions are personal not ideological. His political career may have had Hindutva roots, but it was clear to me that if he needed to abandon these in the pursuit of a political legacy, he wouldn’t think twice. Given Modi’s amplified sense of self and his well-earned satisfaction at having reached where he has, it would not be an exaggeration to say that what guided him was probably the desire to go down in history as one of the greatest and longest serving prime ministers the country had ever had. But this could hardly be possible if his government remained mired in sectarian and divisive controversies. Why was Modi not reining in right-wing extremists in a visible way? Was he reining them in at all? It was hard to explain how a government that was voted in at least partially on the strength of its effective messaging and communication had lost control over the development narrative so soon. Was it incompetence, ideological confusion or simply a mild contempt for a liberal media that the BJP had in any case always seen as biased?

Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest. Relying on its kindness in this as in other things, and actuated by that fervent love towards it, which is so natural to a man who views in it the native soil of himself and his progenitors for several generations, I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.

If we analyze white supremacy from the philosophical lens of Star Wars, then it is all the Sith Lords, the Empire, and the First Order commanded by the Dark Side of the Force. It wants to dominate and impose its will on all galaxies, even those far, far away. Let’s just call this insidious force THE WHITENESS. The Whiteness’s ability to inspire fear and anger is so strong that it corrupted many well-​intentioned people, including people of color, to vote for an incompetent vulgarian in 2016 and 2020. It deludes many liberal and “moderate” whites into believing that they are the “good” ones who are committed to social justice as they talk about white privilege but never actually give up any of it. Still, they’ll have these discussions about racial equality with their white friends in establishments with white patrons from white neighborhoods—​without including the rest of us. The Whiteness has always played for all the marbles. It’s not interested in diplomacy, a representative government, free and fair elections, equitable pay, and a delicious buffet of meals from a multitude of countries. It needs a border wall, a Muslim Ban, and affirmative action for wealthy white students at Yale University. It’s a system, a structure, a paradigm, an ideology whose ultimate goal is domination and submission by any means necessary.

She has always said that talking makes everyone feel better. He says talking is the equivalent of grooming. The tongue and fingers are governed by the same parts of the brain. He marvels at how close they can be some nights on the phone and how words really are the equal of touch. Bakelite pressed hard against his ear. She says it's not just the freedom from him and from their daughter. I feel some sort of opening. I saw things so clearly today. He thinks about the solitary figure in every religion, the monks, saints and shamans in every tradition who walk out into wilderness on their own and find revelation. It's what solitude does to a social animal he says. People talk of recognizing something greater than themselves when they're alone because we finally have to realize how helpless we are as individuals. There's a freedom, a sense of wonder in feeling for a moment that we don't have to please anyone or adjust to the needs of others. And there's a fear in realizing how small we are, how much those distant others normally insulate us from seeing the limits of our mostly incompetent bodies. When we're on our own we seek solutions and speculate and fictionalize because that's what we do when we're confronted with survival. That's revelation. Maybe she says, I'm just saying I'd like to eat less meat. We could have fish.

Only as a young man playing pool all night for money had he been able to find what he wanted in life, and then only briefly. People thought pool hustling was corrupt and sleazy, worse than boxing. But to win at pool, to be a professional at it, you had to deliver. In a business you could pretend that skill and determination had brought you along, when it had only been luck and muddle. A pool hustler did not have the freedom to believe that. There were well-paid incompetents everywhere living rich lives. They arrogated to themselves the plush hotel suites and Lear Jets that America provided for the guileful and lucky far more than it did for the wise. You could fake and bluff and luck your way into all of it. Hotel suites overlooking Caribbean private beaches. Bl*wj*bs from women of stunning beauty. Restaurant meals that it took four tuxedoed waiters to serve, with the sauces just right. The lamb or duck in tureen sliced with precise and elegant thinness, sitting just so on the plate, the plate facing you just so on the heavy white linen, the silver fork heavy gleaming in your manicured hand below the broad cloth cuff and mother of pearl buttons. You could get that from luck and deceit even while causing the business or the army or the government that supported you to do poorly at what it did. The world and all its enterprises could slide downhill through stupidity and bad faith. But the long gray limousines would still hum through the streets of New York, of Paris, of Moscow, of Tokyo. Though the men who sat against the soft leather in back with their glasses of 12-year-old scotch might be incapable of anything more than looking important, of wearing the clothes and the hair cuts and the gestures that the world, whether it liked to or not, paid for, and always had paid for. Eddie would lie in bed sometimes at night and think these things in anger, knowing that beneath the anger envy lay like a swamp. A pool hustler had to do what he claimed to be able to do. The risks he took were not underwritten. His skill on the arena of green cloth, cloth that was itself the color of money, could never be only pretense. Pool players were often cheats and liars, petty men whose lives were filled with pretensions, who ran out on their women and walked away from their debts. But on the table with the lights overhead beneath the cigarette smoke and the silent crowd around them in whatever dive of a billiard parlor at four in the morning, they had to find the wherewithal inside themselves to do more than promise excellence. Under whatever lies might fill the life, the excellence had to be there, it had to be delivered. It could not be faked. But Eddie did not make his living that way anymore.

In the face of the calamity, the Modi government froze. In the seven months from March to September 2020, Modi made 82 public appearances—physical as well as virtual. In the next four months, he made 111 such appearances. From February to 25 April 2021, he clocked 92 public appearances. From 25 April, after he called off the Kumbh and his Bengal rallies, Modi disappeared. He made no public appearance for 20 days.147 The prime minister of India fled the field when his people needed the government most. Through all of April and much of May, upper class Indians flooded Twitter with calls for help to find hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, drugs like Remdesivir and ventilators.148 The Union did not think to set up a helpline to guide those who needed this help. Into this space strode the youth Congress leader B.V. Srinivas (@srinivasiyc) who, with a team of volunteers, began to help people reaching out for aid on Twitter. He was so effective in the absence of the State and any government presence that even the embassies of New Zealand and the Philippines contacted him for help when staffers fell ill with Covid.149 Focussed on the government’s image, Jaishankar tweeted: ‘This was an unsolicited supply as they had no Covid cases. Clearly for cheap publicity by you know who. Giving away cylinders like this when there are people in desperate need of oxygen is simply appalling.’ The New Zealand embassy staffer who had received oxygen from Srinivas on 2 May died 18 days later.

He tried to answer the question of why the Italians have produced the greatest artistic, political and scientific minds of the ages, but have still never become a major world power. Why are they the planet’s masters of verbal diplomacy, but still so inept at home government? Why are they so individually valiant, yet so collectively unsuccessful as an army? How can they be such shrewd merchants on the personal level, yet such inefficient capitalists as a nation? His answers to these questions are more complex than I can fairly encapsulate here, but have much to do with a sad Italian history of corruption by local leaders and exploitation by foreign dominators, all of which has generally led Italians to draw the seemingly accurate conclusion that nobody and nothing in this world can be trusted. Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one’s own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent “opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors…” In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.

The government has a great need to restore its credibility, to make people forget its history and rewrite it. The intelligentsia have to a remarkable degree undertaken this task. It is also necessary to establish the "lessons" that have to be drawn from the war, to ensure that these are conceived on the narrowest grounds, in terms of such socially neutral categories as "stupidity" or "error" or "ignorance" or perhaps "cost." Why? Because soon it will be necessary to justify other confrontations, perhaps other U.S. interventions in the world, other Vietnams. But this time, these will have to be successful intervention, which don't slip out of control. Chile, for example. It is even possible for the press to criticize successful interventions - the Dominican Republic, Chile, etc. - as long as these criticisms don't exceed "civilized limits," that is to say, as long as they don't serve to arouse popular movements capable of hindering these enterprises, and are not accompanied by any rational analysis of the motives of U.S. imperialism, something which is complete anathema, intolerable to liberal ideology. How is the liberal press proceeding with regard to Vietnam, that sector which supported the "doves"? By stressing the "stupidity" of the U.S. intervention; that's a politically neutral term. It would have been sufficient to find an "intelligent" policy. The war was thus a tragic error in which good intentions were transmuted into bad policies, because of a generation of incompetent and arrogant officials. The war's savagery is also denounced, but that too, is used as a neutral category...Presumably the goals were legitimate - it would have been all right to do the same thing, but more humanely... The "responsible" doves were opposed to the war - on a pragmatic basis. Now it is necessary to reconstruct the system of beliefs according to which the United States is the benefactor of humanity, historically committed to freedom, self-determination, and human rights. With regard to this doctrine, the "responsible" doves share the same presuppositions as the hawks. They do not question the right of the United States to intervene in other countries. Their criticism is actually very convenient for the state, which is quite willing to be chided for its errors, as long as the fundamental right of forceful intervention is not brought into question. ... The resources of imperialist ideology are quite vast. It tolerates - indeed, encourages - a variety of forms of opposition, such as those I have just illustrated. It is permissible to criticize the lapses of the intellectuals and of government advisers, and even to accuse them of an abstract desire for "domination," again a socially neutral category not linked in any way to concrete social and economic structures. But to relate that abstract "desire for domination" to the employment of force by the United States government in order to preserve a certain system of world order, specifically, to ensure that the countries of the world remain open insofar as possible to exploitation by U.S.-based corporations - that is extremely impolite, that is to argue in an unacceptable way.

When difficulties confront him he no longer blames them upon the inscrutable enmity of remote and ineffable powers; he blames them upon his own ignorance and incompetence. And when he sets out to remedy that ignorance and to remove that incompetence he does not look to any such powers for light and leading; he puts his whole trust in his own enterprise and ingenuity. Not infrequently he overestimates his capacities and comes to grief, but his failures, at worst, are much fewer than the failures of his fathers. Does pestilence, on occasion, still baffle his medicine? Then it is surely less often than the pestilences of old baffled sacrifice and prayer. Does war remain to shame him before the bees, and wasteful and witless government to make him blush when he contemplates the ants? Then war at its most furious is still less cruel than Hell, and the harshest statutes ever devised by man have more equity and benevolence in them than the irrational and appalling jurisprudence of the Christian God. Today every such man knows that the laws which prevail in the universe, whatever their origin in some remote and incomprehensible First Purpose, manifest themselves in complete impersonality, and that no representation to any superhuman Power, however imagined, can change their operation in the slightest. He knows that when they seem arbitrary and irrational it is not because omnipotent and inscrutable Presences are playing with them, as a child might play with building blocks; but because the human race is yet too ignorant to penetrate to their true workings. The whole history of progress, as the modern mind sees it, is a history of such penetrations. ... Each in its turn has narrowed the dominion and prerogative of the gods.

No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force. Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists. Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms.” This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza. Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms,” is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international” work.

These newly minted right-wingers were rattling off old Birch slogans: Immigrants are the enemy. Protect our borders and deport all illegal aliens. Gays are ungodly. Pray the gay away from children and teens. Unemployed people don’t want to work, and poor people keep themselves poor, on purpose. If we cut the minimum wage and eliminate unemployment compensation, everyone will have a job. Unions caused the economic collapse by shielding lazy, incompetent public employees. Rich folks are “job creators,” and we need to protect their wealth. Social Security is unsustainable, and Medicare and Medicaid have to be restricted so that corporations and “job creators” have lower tax rates. Abortion is murder and must be outlawed even in cases of rape and incest. No exception means no exceptions; even in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. The economic meltdown of 2008 came from high taxes on corporations, too many regulations, and poor people taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford. The government can’t create jobs, so stimulus programs don’t work. Cutting taxes creates jobs. The government can’t limit the right to own or carry guns. If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. America is God’s chosen nation, but our president can’t understand our exceptionalism. After all, he’s not a “real” American; he’s a Marxist, Socialist, Muslim racist who hates America.

When an "evil" becomes customary, it tends to lose the negative value put on it and in men's minds tends to become a "good." And so, we hear much these days in praise of the very kind of government which the Founding Fathers tried to prevent by their blueprint; that is, of a paternalistic establishment ruling for and over a subject people. A virtue has been made of what was once considered a vice. This transmutation of political values has been accompanied by a transmutation of moral values, as a matter of necessity; people who have no rights are presumably without free will; at least, there is no call for the exercise of free will (as in the case of a slave) when a paternalistic government assumes the obligations of living. Why, for instance, should one be charitable when the government provides for the incompetent or the unfortunate? Why should one be honest when all that is necessary to "get by" is to obey the law? Why should one give thought to one's future when the matter can be left to a munificent government? And, with the government providing "free" schooling, including "free" lunches, even the parents' obligations to their children can be sloughed off.

The blatant incompetence in corporate government law enforcement is truly embarrassing.

Suddenly, to be educated was to be despised. Now, when it came to physicians, Americans not only tolerated but demanded incompetence. So high was the common man exalted that state governments, all but three, actually repealed licensing requirements for doctors.

Governments lately seem timid, beleaguered, and incompetent to keep up with the times.

It is unfortunate that the government chooses to be willfully incompetent in the field of environmental radiation.

There is no shortage of willful incompetence within the government regarding environmental radiation.

What are your feelings from Bush to Obama? Besides being responsible for the death of half a million people, I feel like Bush dealt a huge economic and social blow to the USA, one from which we may never fully recover. He directly flushed 3 trillion dollars down the toilet on hopeless, pointlessly destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq …and they’re not even over! For years to come, we’ll be paying costs for all the injured veterans (over 50,000) and destabilizing three countries, because you have to look at the impact that the Afghan war has on Pakistan. Bush expanded the use of torture, and created a whole new layer of government bureaucracy (the “Department of Homeland Security”) to spy on Americans. He created Indefinite Detention (at Guantanamo and other US military bases) and expanded the use of executive-ordered assassinations using the new drone technology. On economic issues, his administration allowed corporations to run things and regulate themselves. The agency that was supposed to regulate oil drilling had lobbyist-paid prostitutes sleeping with employees while oil industry lobbyists basically ran the agency. Energy companies like Enron, and the country’s investment banks were deregulated at the end of the Clinton administration and Bush allowed them to run wild. Above all, he was incompetent and appointed some really stupid people to important positions at every level of government. Certainly, Obama has been involved in many of these same activities. A few he’s increased, such as the use of drone assassinations, but most of them he has at least tried to scale back. At the beginning of his first term, he tried to close the Guantanamo prison and have trials for many of the detainees in the United States but conservatives (including many Democrats) stirred up public resistance and blocked this from happening. He tried to get some kind of universal healthcare because over 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. This is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies and foreclosures because someone gets sick in a family, loses their job, loses their health insurance (because American employers are source of most people’s healthcare) and they can’t pay their health bills or their mortgage. Or they use up all their money caring for a sick family member. So many people in the US wanted health insurance reform or single-payer, universal health care similar to what you have in the UK. Members of Obama’s own party (The Democrats) joined with Republicans to narrowly block “The public option” but they managed to pass a half-assed but not-unsubstantial reform of health insurance that would prevent insurers from denying you coverage when you’re sick or have a “preexisting condition.” The minute it was signed into law, Republicans sued in the courts (all the way to the supreme court) and fought, tooth and nail to block its implementation. Same thing with gun control, even as we’re one of the most violent industrial countries in the world. (Among industrial countries, our murder rate is second only to Russia). Obama has managed to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan over Republican opposition but, literally, everything he tries to do, they blast it in the media and fight it in Congress. So, while I have a lot of criticisms of Obama, he is many orders of magnitude less awful than Bush and many of the positive things he’s tried to do have been blocked. That said, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on more things than they disagree. Both signed off on the Afghan and Iraq wars. Both signed off on deregulation of banks, of derivatives, of mortgage regulations and of the energy and telecom business …and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. I’m guessing it’s the same thing with Labor and Conservatives in the UK. Labor or Democrats will SAY they stand for certain “progressive” things but they end up supporting the same old crap... (2014 interview with iamhiphop)

Reconstructing family life amid the chaos of the cotton revolution was no easy matter. Under the best of circumstances, the slave family on the frontier was extraordinarily unstable because the frontier plantation was extraordinarily unstable. For every aspiring master who climbed into the planter class, dozens failed because of undercapitalization, unproductive land, insect infestation, bad weather, or sheer incompetence. Others, discouraged by low prices and disdainful of the primitive conditions, simply gave up and returned home. Those who succeeded often did so only after they had failed numerous times. Each failure or near-failure caused slaves to be sold, shattering families and scattering husbands and wives, parents and children. Success, moreover, was no guarantee of security for slaves. Disease and violence struck down some of the most successful planters. Not even longevity assured stability, as many successful planters looked west for still greater challenges. Whatever the source, the chronic volatility of the plantation took its toll on the domestic life of slaves. Despite these difficulties, the family became the center of slave life in the interior, as it was on the seaboard. From the slaves' perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or mechanic but husband or wife, son or daughter - the precise opposite of their owners' calculation. As in Virginia and the Carolinas, the family became the locus of socialization, education, governance, and vocational training. Slave families guided courting patterns, marriage rituals, child-rearing practices, and the division of domestic labor in Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond. Sally Anne Chambers, who grew up in Louisiana, recalled how slaves turned to the business of family on Saturdays and Sundays. 'De women do dey own washing den. De menfolks tend to de gardens round dey own house. Dey raise some cotton and sell it to massa and git li'l money dat way.' As Sally Anne Chambers's memories reveal, the reconstructed slave family was more than a source of affection. It was a demanding institution that defined responsibilities and enforced obligations, even as it provided a source of succor. Parents taught their children that a careless word in the presence of the master or mistress could spell disaster. Children and the elderly, not yet or no longer laboring in the masters' fields, often worked in the slaves' gardens and grounds, as did new arrivals who might be placed in the household of an established family. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, was accepted into his new family but only when he agreed to contribute all of his overwork 'earnings into the family stock.' The 'family stock' reveals how the slaves' economy undergirded the slave family in the southern interior, just as it had on the seaboard. As slaves gained access to gardens and grounds, overwork, or the sale of handicraft, they began trading independently and accumulating property. The material linkages of sellers and buyers - the bartering of goods and labor among themselves - began to knit slaves together into working groups that were often based on familial connections. Before long, systems of ownership and inheritance emerged, joining men and women together on a foundation of need as well as affection.

It is true that work can expand to fill the time allotted but it can expand far beyond that. It can expand beyond the life of the organization and the company can go bankrupt, a government can fall, a civilization can crumble into barbarism, while the incompetents work on.

Khodorkovsky won few allies in this fight. His contempt for government officials was alienating, as were his demands that the government fire officials on the sole grounds that he found them incompetent

The mantra that government is corrupt and incompetent has produced the kind of jaded citizenry who can react to news of shameless corruption among its elected leaders with a shrug, from Washington, DC, to Jerusalem and Moscow. They basically have learned to expect nothing else, and stop paying attention.

when I took over my father’s business, when I began to deal with the whole industrial system of the world, it was then that I began to see the nature of the evil I had suspected, but thought too monstrous to believe. I saw the tax-collecting vermin that had grown for centuries like mildew on d’Anconia Copper, draining us by no right that anyone could name—I saw the government regulations passed to cripple me, because I was successful, and to help my competitors, because they were loafing failures—I saw the labor unions who won every claim against me, by reason of my ability to make their livelihood possible—I saw that any man’s desire for money he could not earn was regarded as a righteous wish, but if he earned it, it was damned as greed—I saw the politicians who winked at me, telling me not to worry, because I could just work a little harder and outsmart them all. I looked past the profits of the moment, and I saw that the harder I worked, the more I tightened the noose around my throat, I saw that my energy was being poured down a sewer, that the parasites who fed on me were being fed upon in their turn, that they were caught in their own trap—and that there was no reason for it, no answer known to anyone, that the sewer pipes of the world, draining its productive blood, led into some dank fog nobody had dared to pierce, while people merely shrugged and said that life on earth could be nothing but evil. And then I saw that the whole industrial establishment of the world, with all of its magnificent machinery, its thousand-ton furnaces, its transatlantic cables, its mahogany offices, its stock exchanges, its blazing electric signs, its power, its wealth—all of it was run, not by bankers and boards of directors, but by any unshaved humanitarian in any basement beer joint, by any face pudgy with malice, who preached that virtue must be penalized for being virtue, that the purpose of ability is to serve incompetence, that man has no right to exist except for the sake of others. .

people. My country is not one of intellectual depravity or religious fanaticism. My country is not one governed by a constitutional system so ridiculous and so cumbersome, it openly invites incompetence and corruption and political cripples. My country is not one so militarily feeble that she cannot keep treaties such as a pledge" he waved an arm around the room, "to defend the Philippines. My country--

The Maui wildfire disaster turned into a sad story about government incompetence.

I believed in democracy much the same way I believed in short sentences and small words. Democracy, like murder, is a simple word. I saw it as a general good opposed to a general wrong. By democracy, I did not mean the elected administration. The government, every government, failed often, was complicit often, was by and large incompetent, hypocritical, and out of touch. The democracy I believed in was the nation, a community of millions who saw brutality as an aberration to be condemned as often and as vigorously as necessity demanded.

only became apparent years later that Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! was prophetic in important ways. The movie captured the spirit of the age, and it documented the kind of political struggles that would eventually ruin Peace’s political career. At its core, the movie is about government incompetence and institutional decay. The tomatoes make only a few cameo appearances as they attack Californians enjoying the fruits of American middle-class life. What’s more important is the fact that the tomatoes were unleashed by incompetent government scientists working at a top-secret USDA test plot, who accidentally create a strain of lethal fruit.

All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.

Paradoxically enough, the release of initiative and enterprise made possible by popular self-government ultimately generates disintegrating forces from within. Again and again after freedom has brought opportunity and some degree of plenty, the competent become selfish, luxury-loving and complacent, the incompetent and the unfortunate grow envious and covetous, and all three groups turn aside from the hard road of freedom to worship the Golden Calf of economic security. The historical cycle seems to be: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more. At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies. Under such circumstances, the competent citizen is certainly not a fool if he insists upon using the compass of history when forced to sail uncharted seas. Usually so-called new remedies are not new at all. Compulsory planned economy, for example, was tried by the Chinese some three milleniums ago, and by the Romans in the early centuries of the Christian era. It was applied in Germany, Italy and Russia long before the present war broke out. Yet it is being seriously advocated today as a solution of our economic problems in the United States. Its proponents confidently assert that government can successfully plan and control all major business activity in the nation, and still not interfere with our political freedom and our hard-won civil and religious liberties. The lessons of history all point in exactly the reverse direction.

Where the theologian is forced to rescue an incompetent spirit who has, for one imaginative reason or another, lost total control of his creation, the gospel of the malevolent hand stands unchaste, uncontaminated, and inviolable.

We turn our attention to the government and we whine about the incompetence of the police, we also complain about the breakdown in law and order. Yet, we forget that we actually had a role to play in the consequences we are reaping.

Governments sacked these obviously incompetent ministers in charge of their Exchequers and passed new laws enforcing the old laws about observing the ancient laws regarding not evading tax laws.

In my city we spent $1.6 billion on a new ticketing system for the trains. We replaced paper tickets with smartcards and now they can tell where people get on and off. So, question: how is that worth $1.6 billion? People say it’s the government being incompetent, and ok. But this is happening all over. All the transit networks are getting smartcards, the grocery stores are taking your name, the airports are getting face recognition cameras. Those cameras, they don’t work when people try to avoid them. Like, they can be fooled by glasses. We KNOW they’re ineffective as anti-terrorism devices, but we still keep installing them. All of this stuff—the smartcards, the ID systems, the “anti-congestion” car-tracking tech—all of it is terrible at what it’s officially supposed to do. It’s only good for tracking the rest of us, the 99.9% who just use the smartcard or whatever and let ourselves be tracked because it’s easier. I’m not a privacy nut, and I don’t care that much if these organizations want to know where I go and what I buy. But what bothers me is how HARD they’re all working for that data, how much money they’re spending, and how they never admit that’s what they want. It means that information must be really valuable for some reason, and I just wonder to who and why.

an ideology may resonate among a particular community due to a broad range of political issues like incompetent, authoritarian or corrupt governments, as well as economic issues like widespread poverty or unemployment. In many instances, the political and socioeconomic grievances that lead to terrorism are tied to a government’s legitimacy, or lack thereof.