Thank you for the condolences I received on my previous post. I’m concerned, however, that this blog tends unfairly toward pessimism.

Ayn Rand wrote that the government makes us all criminals because criminals are easier to control. In the U.S., the federal tax code alone is more than 24 megabytes in length, and contains more than 3.4 million words; printed 60 lines to the page, it would fill more than 7500 letter-size pages. (The often cited figure of 80,000 pages seems to be an exaggeration.)

In any case, the vast quantity of laws, regulations and codes leaves every entrepreneur scared that he might have violated one of them. There’s no way to be sure. Hence, success should be enjoyed quietly. Entrepreneurs have good incentive to hide any triumph over bureaucracy. Failure doesn’t invite a bureaucrat’s scrutiny the way success does.

I’ve alluded to this before. I think I’ve come to understand thee reason for Ukraine’s psychopathic bureaucracy. Where western bureaucracies were created from nothing in pursuit of a goal — education, food safety, building safety. Perhaps the worst you could say, they were created with this public goal, while the private goal was the establishment of monopoly privilege. They had to at least appear to be working. Ukrainian bureaucracy is an *imitation* of these failed systems of the west built atop the lingering habits and moral depravity of Socialism.

There was no lustration as happened in central Europe. Ukraine inherited more Soviet bureaucrats and bureaucracies than did other post-Soviet states.