Politics & Power Quote by George P. Shultz

Shultz lands the joke with the deadpan timing of someone who’s watched both machines up close and knows which one actually moves. The line is structured like a neat little trap: it begins as a commonsense lesson in managerial responsibility - give an order, expect it to be carried out - then flips into a punchline about government’s notorious inertia. The humor isn’t just cynicism for sport; it’s a compact theory of institutional power. In business, authority tends to be legible: hierarchies are clearer, incentives are tighter, consequences arrive on a predictable schedule. That makes a boss’s words dangerous, because they translate quickly into action.

Government, Shultz implies, is the opposite kind of dangerous: not because it acts too fast, but because it often can’t act at all. The subtext is about diffusion of responsibility. Orders in the public sector are diluted by process, law, interagency rivalries, congressional oversight, public scrutiny, and the simple fact that “the public” is the stakeholder who never leaves the room. A directive becomes a memo, then a meeting, then a review, then a pilot program - and by the time it’s real, the political moment has changed.

Coming from a figure who served at the highest levels of U.S. economic and foreign policy, the line reads less like an outsider’s cheap shot than an insider’s grimly affectionate warning. It’s a reminder that democratic governance is designed to be friction-heavy for reasons that are often noble - accountability, rights, deliberation - but that same friction can feel, from the driver’s seat, like trying to steer a ship through a committee. Shultz makes the frustration quotable by making it funny, and makes it funny by keeping it true.