In response to
A Job Too Good to Be True

Ronald Reagan quoted "The two biggest lies in the world are, 'I work for the government and I am here to help you.'"I about 1972 I had business with the office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. The attorney I was working with and many of his colleagues were clearly and visibly buried in presumably legitimate work.As I waited about 2 hours to have my audience (even though I had an advance appointment) I noted that the entire secretarial staff of 10 or so for the office were gathered around a single desk, near me. Without even trying to eavesdrop it was obvious that the subject of discussion was how each of the assembled workers could take holiday, vacation and sick leave days in order to maximize time off using the minimum of actual vacation days. This discussion was during the work day, not including either "lunch" or "break" time. The problem I see is that all layers of government hire too many to do too much and then waste immense amounts of time doing little more than causing mischief and delay for the suffering public. Parkinson's law prevails! I quote from Wikipedia:"Parkinson's law is the adage first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955:[1][2]Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.It was later reprinted together with other essays in the book Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress (London, John Murray, 1958). He derived the dictum from his extensive experience in the British Civil Service.The current form of the law is not that which Parkinson refers to by that name in the article. Rather, he assigns to the term a mathematical equation describing the rate at which bureaucracies expand over time. Much of the essay is dedicated to a summary of purportedly scientific observations supporting his law, such as the increase in the number of employees at the Colonial Office while Great Britain's overseas empire declined (indeed, he shows that the Colonial Office had its greatest number of staff at the point when it was folded into the Foreign Office because of a lack of colonies to administer). He explains this growth by two forces: (1) "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals" and (2) "Officials make work for each other." He notes in particular that the total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rose by 5-7% per year "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done".In 1986, Alessandro Natta complained about the swelling bureaucracy in Italy. Mikhail Gorbachev responded that "Parkinson's Law works everywhere".