Black Hole Government

In an interesting piece about how to get to space, Jerry Pournelle describes a dangerous feedback loop in our government:

Quoting Jerry Pournelle:

It isn’t strictly true that government always mucks things up, but it’s often enough so.  A, if not the, major purpose of government is to extract money from non-government and use it to hire and pay government employees.  This guarantees that government will always expand; and there inevitably comes a point at which the addition of people to a project has a negative impact.  Almost all long-standing government agencies and projects have people who are worse than merely useless, they are in the way; and the more conscientious they are about earning their pay the more they tend to get in the gears and bring progress to a halt.

And this was written ten years ago, before the public pensions disaster came to a head.