Election Day Thoughts from Harold Laski, Commie Ratfink

Back in 1924, in a letter to esteemed American judicial annoyance Oliver Wendell "taxes are the price we pay to keep people like me employed" Holmes, Laski, model in part for Rand's Ellsworth Toohey and a distinguished British Labour party radical in the 1940s, bit on some "man bites dog" truth, worth remembering, because though we elect the politicians, the bureaucrats make decisions for us all:

I can, I think, recite fairly fully on the habits of bureaucracy. The things which distinguish it are these: 1. Its members all say the same thing. 2. They cannot understand that their expert knowledge is open to independent inquiry…..3. They have complete contempt for all outside their charmed circle….4. They do not realize how many people there are who want a share, however small, in deciding their own destiny…they hardly see why people should want to make their own rules.