Inefficiency Quotes
Political conservatives have generally been very verbal in their attacks upon and criticisms of bureaucracy. And yet, bureaucrats are the epitome of conservatism in their outlook and mode of operation as is made clear by this quotation.
He was Governor-General of Korea when he made this statement. “Squeeze” was the word for bribes literally translated then from Korean. In most instances of racial discrimination “laziness” is almost always attributed to the so called “inferior” people, like the British with the Arabs, and the American Southerners with the Negroes.
Edison was a great inventor but not really a scientist. He had tremendous perseverance but went at each problem with brute force and trial and error. Tesla in contrast was designing and inventing on such a large scale that there was never enough money or manpower to implement trial and error; He had to derive his work from theory and vision using mathematics extensively. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.
What makes this quotation memorable is that fact that it was public stated. Presidents have almost never gone into a local area and publicly stated that one of its governmental institutions was corrupt. Moreover, the corruption had not only gone on with the laxity of the state and city officials who had been Republicans and of the President’s own party—Democrats. The speech was, surprisingly to some, very warmly received by a public and political audience who had known of the corruption for years, but finally someone was trying to do something about it.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield
