Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 53 of the 2008 Third Edition of the late Vincent Ostrom’s 1973 book, The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration (reference deleted; link added):

[Gordon] Tullock suggests that the limits on control in very large public bureaucracies will engender “bureaucratic free enterprise” when individuals and groups within an organization proceed to formulate their own missions with opportunities for side payoffs, including graft and corruption. Goal displacement and risk avoidance motivated by individual self-interest will generate organizational dysfunctions as elaborate justifications are fabricated to cover potential exposures to the scrutiny of superior authorities. The social consequences generated by an organization become increasingly contradictory and unreal to an independent observer when compared with public rhetoric about organizational purposes and goals.

DBx: Pictured here – sometime in the mid or late 1980s in his office on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus – is my late, great colleague Gordon Tullock.