Politics & Power Quote by Michael Burgess

“Empowering the individual” is the velvet glove here; “inertia in big government” is the hammer. Burgess is doing a familiar congressional two-step: he frames a political preference as a moral instinct (trust people) and then casts bureaucracy as not just inefficient but dangerously slow in the face of urgency. The line is built for crisis politics, when voters are primed to treat speed as virtue and deliberation as vice. “Rapidly evolving” is the key phrase: it’s a rhetorical accelerant that makes caution sound like negligence.

The subtext is less about individuals than about authority. Burgess isn’t merely praising personal agency; he’s arguing for shifting decision-making away from federal institutions toward states, local actors, private entities, or the market. “Degree of inertia” is also doing strategic work: it’s measured enough to sound reasonable, while still indicting “big government” as structurally incapable. He’s not saying government made mistakes; he’s saying government is the mistake.

As a congressman, he’s also preemptively laundering responsibility. If the federal response falters, the villain is “inertia,” an impersonal force, not the people who designed the rules, cut budgets, or fought oversight. The statement reads like a policy argument but functions as narrative control: in a crisis, he wants the audience to associate federal coordination with delay and individual (or decentralized) action with competence. It’s a freedom story with an escape hatch.