Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
If ever there were a place where people not only tend not to face economic facts, but it's almost their purpose not to face economic facts, it's Washington.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes the tendency of people in Washington to ignore economic realities.
P. J. O'Rourke highlights a prevalent issue in Washington, where political pressure and personal agendas often lead to a neglect of economic facts and principles. This statement reflects a broader skepticism regarding the motives of politicians and their capacity to confront the truth about economic conditions, suggesting that avoidance of economic reality has become an ingrained practice in the political landscape.
In practice
During a political debate, to emphasize the importance of facing economic realities.
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
The government should help and guide the weak and small racial groups within its national boundaries toward self-determination and self-government. It should offer resistance to foreign aggression, and simultaneously, it should revise foreign treaties in order to restore our equality and independence among the nations.
If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require.
In a democracy, when you get 20 million people in the street, you resign.
I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.
I think it's about time! Who cares whether he is looking for votes or not! At least your country is moving forward with the times!
If you're going to have any kind of political opposition in the 21st century, then it has to be as fundamentally liquid as the rapidly changing society we're living in.
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