For background on government, read G. A. Campbell, _The Civil Service in Britain_, 1955, (“A Detailed Explanation of the System of the Civil Service and of the Way in which the Administrative Work of the Government is Divided Among its Departments”). Campbell, who had worked in the movie-making sections of the Royal Post Office, and the Ministry of Information, took early retirement in 1953, in order to go into commercial television. This book is one of those very fine ones, which Englishmen can write, and Americans generally cannot. Even after more than fifty years, it remains fresh and valid, and, with some qualifications, equally applicable to American government.

One of the points Campbell makes (in the chapter on “Common Services”) is that the system of requisitioning supplies is almost deliberately unwieldy, so that a civil servant may just decide to go out and buy whatever he needs, with his own money, and that this is a commendable savings to the tax-payer. Schools and colleges operate on the same basic system as the government of course. It is a very common thing for a first-grade teacher to purchase, with her own money, the requisite quantities of milk, orange juice, cookies, etc. for the class’s morning snack.

Nowadays, computers are a special case, because they tend to hold the employer’s data, and to have security issues. If it were merely a matter of money, it would undoubtedly be a good thing for people to bring in their own computers. As it is, the remedies are probably to be found in things like virtual terminal software, designed so that the actual data, in digital form, does not actually leave the server. All the client gets is a “dithered bitmap,” which doesn’t OCR very well. This is not infallible, but it does mean that someone like Bradley Manning cannot easily harvest thousands of documents.

Unless you are doing something very graphical, like video games, old computers are perfectly adequate. I’m writing this on a computer I bought back in 2004, which might have a fair market value of fifty dollars. Come to that, the computer is sitting on a desk which I bought back in 1986, for thirty-five dollars, inclusive of delivery, from my then-landlady. Businessmen sometimes tend to fall into the opposite error, of worshiping newness and spiffiness for the sake of newness and spiffiness. They have to have the latest and newest computer, along with the most expensive office furniture, or they don’t feel valued. It’s a bit like a little girl’s delight in having a new dress, of velvet or satin, with abundant lace trim. She knows daddy loves her because daddy brought her home a present on returning from a business trip.

The main error someone like Lamar Smith fell into was an inability to read the people involved, people like us. He thought he was being conciliatory, when he was being the opposite. For example, he was not accustomed to the idea that Wikipedia is a volunteer organization, and was not accustomed to the idea that the Wikipedians might be prepared to stage a protest blackout (is that still on for the day after tomorrow, by the way?). Companies don’t behave that way– they try to become dependent on government money, and are thereafter afraid of losing it. Someone like Lamar Smith has no experience dealing with a borderline-anarchy. In the film version of Howard Fast’s _April Morning_, there is an amusing exchange, as the British are retreating from Concord on April 19, 1775:

British Lieutenant (hunched down in edginess): “Sir, we _must_ surrender!”
British Major (infuriated): “Surrender to _whom_, you idiot? They have no leader!”

That is the nature of the internet– there is no one empowered to compromise, no one with whom Lamar Smith can deal.

You have all missed the elephant. The real problem is bribery. The power to decide what gets bought and when, has been most carefully centralized. A tiny number of individuals actually take the decision and everybody else gets no actual say. (There might be “inclusiveness theater” going on.) Then the vendors bribe those few individuals. The decision makers deliberately choose obsolete equipment at a high price, because that is what is most profitable to the vendors. If you want to know who is doing the bribing, then find out who is being paid the money. If you want to know who is getting bribed, that is the real decision makers.