Motus Mentis

Here’s a headline from today’s Washington Post:

A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just 1 is online

The cost? So far, a billion dollars, of your money and mine. By the time the project is completed, in oh, three more years, we’re told, it should be over three billion. (Unless, of course, it ends up taking longer and costing more.)

One imagines that if this were being done by, say, Amazon, it might proceed more efficiently — and, more to the point, that if something like this had ended up being unfinished after a decade, that there would be unpleasant consequences (that word again!) for whoever had been responsible for getting the job done.

This is not Amazon, though; it is our vast and opaque, unelected and completely unaccountable fourth branch of government, the Federal bureaucracy. This is the swollen, necrotic organism that seeks to administer every aspect of our lives, and for which even the great rivers of our money that pour from our wallets into its bottomless coffers — here the ‘Amazon’ comparison is more apposite — are never enough.

Regarding that, here’s another item from the news: our national debt is not the paltry $18 trillion you’ve been hearing about, but is, rather, at least three-and-a-half times that amount.