BORED WITH ITS' REAL PURPOSE, ELECTED OFFICIALS STRIVE 'TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE'

“Maintenance is necessary but boring, and since government is made up of human beings who abhor boredom, few elected officials or high-level managers are all that interested in this mundane task. Instead, they want to do big, exciting, bold new things—things they can claim for their own... No longer does government exist for the purposes of maintenance and upkeep. Instead, it is seen as a means—perhaps the only significant means—of healing social flaws and reweaving the social fabric. In the process, as the social scientist Nathan Glazer once said, we have become more interested in having government do the sorts of things nobody knows how to do (cure poverty) and less interested in ensuring that government master the sorts of technical tasks it used to do pretty well.” —John Podhoretz