Bureaucrats vs. Need

Fellow fans and students of Ayn Rand might recall the following quote from Francisco d'Anconia's Atlas Shrugged speech about money:[W]hen you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing ... you may know that your society is doomed. (p. 385)One might also recall this conclusion seeming plain as day, for which one can thank Ayn Rand's masterful building of context, by weaving together concrete examples together with philosophical argument. Taken in isolation, such a statment might make little sense, and certainly would have little intellectual purchase with a reader from a culture saturated with altruism -- the idea that one man's need is a moral claim on another's effort; and collectivism -- the belief that the basic unit of a society is not the individual, but some larger collective to which each individual belongs. That said, the state government of Louisiana has provided us with a real-life example of what that quote means on a personal…