H. L. Mencken
He has a followup to this
“If America Was A Startup We’d All Quit”
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/22/america-startup-quit/
LAWSUIT!!!
It would be nice if he posted the name of the agent.
If this seems like no big deal, you might be wrong. Consider that everything good about modern civilization was invented by people who really needed to focus to get the job done. What happens to a world-class engineer or entrepreneur when he or she has to syphon off more brain energy to satisfying Safeway’s marketing strategy instead of designing new products? Now multiply that times a hundred because every retailer, website, and business is trying to complicate your life too.
The freeman has a more excellent spirit than that of the slave.
The freeman desires to create maximum efficiency in mundane, rote tasks so that he is free to concentrate on that which is more important, productive.
The slave, the bureaucrat, has no need or care to think this way. It is not his nature. His purpose is to keep busy for no other purpose than to keep busy, even if that means he has to break down or destroy his own environment. "Better" to keep busy pretending to solve [self-generated] problems, than to deal with the pre-existing problems that already need functional solutions.
For legitimate problem-solving the bureaucratically-minded is thoroughly unqualified, but his ego demands that he perceive himself a success. Hence a DHS drone (dronette?) scores success by crafting a sword out of a paperwork SNAFU.
That the error was currency-related, and therefore intertwined with layers of tax and regulatory mandates, meant the boat owner could not simply brush it off as "just paperwork". It would have been a snare of monumental, legal proportions. Not successful in enslaving the prey in that particular trap, the DHS drone resorted to exacting direct punishment upon her unyielding victim. The boat owner's crime was his stubborn insistence upon simple TRUTH.
The more complicated a mundane task can be made to be, the less time there is for that which is truly important. It is not in the slave nature to create and contribute and thus elevate himself (much less his fellow man) to a higher plane of existence or purpose. It is his nature to stay mired in the "complexity of daily life" and to grab, restrain, confound, or destroy those who desire to reach for and occupy that higher place.
Reminds me of
While Jewish belief also speaks of the soul's reward in the hereafter, earned through its toil in the course of life's journey, it sees the refinement of the physical and the infusion of holiness and purpose into the mundane as the paramount objective. It is the sanctification of the human body and the world at large that constitutes the very purpose of its creation.
Moshiach (Messiah...in Hebrew) 101
The price of unnecessary complexity in daily life is not hidden to the freemen, because they are the ones perpetually vexed - or rather taxed - by its existence.