Success Quote by Fred Thompson

Bureaucracy’s original sin, in Fred Thompson’s telling, isn’t malice but forgetfulness: agencies stop seeing the world people actually live in. The line is built to sound modest and reasonable, a “common sense” plea that quietly performs a larger political maneuver. By blaming “agencies” rather than “government,” Thompson targets the unelected machinery of the state - rulewriters, regulators, compliance staff - and implies a democratic mismatch: citizens vote, but paperwork multiplies anyway.

The phrasing matters. “Sometimes” offers plausible deniability, letting him critique regulation without sounding anarchic. “Lose sight” suggests a human lapse, not a systemic feature, which invites a simple fix: rein regulators in, demand accountability, restore “sense.” And “create regulations” frames the process as self-generating, almost organic - rules reproducing rules - sidestepping the fact that agencies often write regulations because Congress mandates them, courts require them, or crises expose gaps.

Contextually, Thompson’s career straddled late-20th-century skepticism toward the administrative state, a period when deregulation was sold as modernization and red tape as a tax on growth. As a politician (and a public figure with a law-and-order aura), he leverages a culturally potent contrast: the practical citizen versus the procedural institution. The subtext isn’t that all rules are foolish; it’s that expertise, once insulated from everyday consequences, can become its own justification. “Common sense” becomes a rhetorical trump card - vague enough to unite disparate frustrations, sharp enough to delegitimize complex tradeoffs regulation is meant to manage.