Success Quote by Ross Perot

Perot’s line is a businessman’s jab disguised as a thought experiment: modern America has a habit of turning simple, solvable problems into monumental institutions. The airplane is doing double duty here. It’s a familiar marvel, yes, but also a stand-in for any technology that feels “too important to fail” once government touches it. By choosing something as obviously useful as flight, he makes the punchline land harder: if even an airplane could be bureaucratized into a moonshot-scale enterprise, what can’t?

The intent is to defend private-sector agility without sounding like a doctrinaire libertarian. Perot isn’t arguing against ambition; he’s arguing against institutional sprawl. N.A.S.A. becomes a rhetorical unit of measurement for administrative gravity: once you build a big enough apparatus, it demands a permanent mission, permanent funding, permanent growth. The joke hinges on inversion. We treat the airplane as an everyday object precisely because it emerged through iterative engineering, competition, and commercial pressure. Perot implies that today we’d treat that same problem as a prestige project, wrapped in committees and procurement cycles.

Context matters: Perot rose as an apostle of efficiency and later made political hay attacking deficits and Washington’s managerial bloat. The subtext is populist but technocratic: ordinary people can sense when systems are overbuilt, and Perot wants that frustration aimed at the federal machine. It’s a clean, memorable metaphor for his larger claim that government doesn’t just deliver solutions; it manufactures complexity as a byproduct of its own survival.