Dear Editor,
Nine times out of a hundred, I agree with you, but I think your recent rants against our Board of Supervisors is misguided. You complain that they are lazy, don’t read the board packets before the meetings, postpone critical issues until just before the state steps in, and considers "closed session" to be when they all put their hands over their ears and shut their eyes. I think you should applaud the board for their heroic effort to remain disorganized. Look at it this way: when government is highly organized, timely, fiscally sound and statutorily integrated, the people suffer. The more efficient government, the more effectively they penetrate your life, the more completely they arbitrarily restrict what you can do. Now, there are a lot of folks whose lives are completely ordinary and they have nothing to fear from underwear sniffing bureaucrats, but I’ve either never met them or promptly forgot them. For the rest of us, life is not so smooth, we find our selves doing things we’d rather not, or would rather forget. The only thing that saves any of us is that the government is composed of bureaucrats who, while they strive to ever-broaden their personal and official powers, also have to spend a great deal of time brown smudging those above and below to keep the system flowing. It is that built-in inefficiency that saves us from the blind stupid things people do when they are bureaucrats. Take the Fatherland Security office. At first blush, we should all reach for our pitchforks and torches. It rolls a whole bunch of agencies into one office under the control of the Executive branch, strengthening the power of the president to badger ordinary citizens. What might save us is that bureaucrats hate to share their fiefdoms with other bureaucrats, so the brown smudging will be complicated and time consuming. It’s the power of inefficiency that preserves our liberties from those who would harm us for our own good. He governs best who governs worst. For this reason I disagree with Editor, and think we should put the County Board of Supervisors in charge of Fatherland Security.—A. Blinken
