In 1981, while selling office equipment in Portland, Oregon, I stumbled onto a truth about government that shaped the rest of my career.

A court had ordered five high-end electronic typewriters—machines packed with memory functions and programmable features. My job was to train the secretaries to use them. But their only task was filling out forms. They didn’t need memory; they needed simplicity. The new typewriters slowed them down.

Curious, I investigated why they had purchased such expensive, unsuitable machines. The answer was startlingly simple: they had to spend their budget or lose it.

In government offices, budget size equals status. Efficiency doesn’t bring rewards—it brings cuts. A department that spends less risks losing both funding and prestige. And if new technology boosts productivity too much, leaders might have to reduce staff—a further blow to reputation.

This perverse incentive structure ensures that inefficiency persists. While businesses thrive by solving problems, government departments survive by managing them. Solving problems too well threatens their existence.

That day, I realized that the issue isn’t bad people—it’s bad incentives. When resources are allocated by politics instead of voluntary exchange, there’s no way to measure real value.

This is exactly why entrepreneurial governance matters. In Free Cities and private communities, budgets depend on value creation, not on bureaucratic optics. Efficiency is rewarded, not punished.

That insight—born in a Portland courtroom surrounded by typewriters—was my first glimpse into how governance could be redesigned to serve people, not politics.

Read the Substack article here.