“The crowd in Washington … benefits enormously from a complicated tax system, a Byzantine regulatory regime, and a bloated budget…. The incentives to ‘play the game’ are enormous…. Big government is inherently corrupting.”
I sometimes think that working at the Cato Institute and trying to change Washington must be akin to working at a church in the middle of Amsterdam’s red light district.
In both cases, you’re wildly outnumbered by people with a different outlook on life. And it’s not that easy to save misguided souls.
The crowd in Washington, for instance, benefits enormously from a complicated tax system, a Byzantine regulatory regime, and a bloated budget.
All of these factors create big opportunities for unearned income for bureaucrats, cronies, politicians, contractors, lobbyists, and other insiders. Telling those people they should back away from the public trough is not exactly a way to make friends in DC.…