Quotes About Inefficiency

What typically happens in government is the exact opposite of how things should work.

conoscienze: acquaintances, friendships, contacts and debts built up over a lifetime of dealing with a system generally agreed, even by those in its employ, perhaps especially by those in its employ, to be inefficient to the point of uselessness, prone to the abuses resultant from centuries of bribery, and encumbered by a Byzantine instinct for secrecy and lethargy.

Vicky cost the taxpayers sixty-five million dollars, and she couldn't predict the time an hour from now. I

Talking to that fool is like trying to put socks on an octopus!

As with most things governmental, failure does not mean having to try something else. It means spending more money.

boondoggles

A single line of code in the Xi'an habitat's maintenance programming kept the cathedral from ever suddenly going oxygen-free—but that line of code had been recently expunged in a system update. For three months, then, nothing had kept human inefficiency from suddenly asphyxiating Archbishop Korbijn and hundreds of celebrants during morning services.

A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?

Bureaucrats complicate. It gives them more work to do. It gives them job security. It means promotions as ever more bureaucrats are added to the Ministry of Redundancy.

You're like a dull knife, it just ain't cutting.

A hundred years ago, it could take you the better part of a year to get from New York to California; whereas today, because of equipment problems at O'Hare, you can't get there at all.

In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise but doesn't work very well.

Britain has invented a new missile. It's called the civil servant - it doesn't work and it can't be fired.

Bureaus are extrusions from the body politic - they are pus

Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them.

What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.

Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.

a nation of superior, unfriendly, discourteous people, set in the old ways of inefficiency, clinging to old dreams of a greatness which we cannot perpetuate…We deceive ourselves if we think the soil is clean. The seeds of distrust and dislike lie dormant in it.

During these months, I calculated, I spent a day and a half per month just moving paper and electronic records from doctor to doctor. I spent an additional three days traveling to doctors' appointments, during which I often waited for an hour or more to be seen for ten minutes. (Or fifteen, when my doctor had time.) Putting it all together, I realized that each month I was losing close to five out of twenty workdays—nearly a quarter of my work time. The

Government is dysfunctional.

The plague of government is senile delinquency.

Among the weeds choking out growth and good government are the hundreds of boards, commissions, and advisory committees that have sprouted over the years. They devour time, money, and energy far beyond any real contribution they make.

Un mundo en el cual todos tienen el poder suficiente para impedir las iniciativas de los demás, pero en el que nadie tiene poder para imponer una línea de actuación, es un mundo donde las decisiones no se toman, se toman demasiado tarde o se diluyen hasta resultar ineficaces.

Bureaucrats -- monkeys who hear no evil and see no evil -- are first in line for promotion.