Our Opinion: Welcome to the bureaucrat event horizon

  • Discuss Comment, Blog about
  • Print Friendly and PDF

It shouldn't be a surprise with the amount of material lawmakers shot through during the past four months they would end up enacting at least one law that was already on the books.

That it happened to be a law designed to weed out redundant boards, committees and panels is the sort of thing that passes into legend.

Unfortunately, neither lawmakers nor the governor would have felt the need to enact a new law had the old one been enforced since it was approved more than 30 years ago.

Certainly the number of boards, commissions and panels have not decreased in the last 30 years.

The Nevada Legislature has regularly solved problems over the past decades by establishing a new committee of some sort to examine the issue.

Anyone seeking a living definition of the word Byzantine need only look at the spiderweb of boards, panels and committees in the state's educational bureaucracy.

The old joke goes that if you lock a bureaucrat into a closet over night, you'll find four more when you open it the next day.

That is pretty close to what happened in Nevada. This time let's not let the law languish. Otherwise we may reach the official event horizon, where every resident either works for the state or sits on a state panel. Good luck reducing government then.

Comments

Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.

Sign in to comment