What makes this little fiasco particularly rich is not merely that those buses were acquired at considerable expense—no, the real masterpiece lies in the fact that they no longer perform the very task they were purchased for. They exist now as expensive monuments to intention, stripped of function but not of cost. And since people still expect transportation to happen in the real world, replacements must be secured. Naturally. Which means spending again. On top of what has already been spent. Progress, in its purest bureaucratic form.
But the second act is where the craft truly reveals itself.
Public officials and their political counterparts have perfected the quiet art of burial. These misallocations—too vulgar to parade openly—are gently folded into “operating costs,” a phrase so bland it could anesthetize a courtroom. Instead of buying and running assets outright, systems drift toward leasing. Not because it’s cheaper. Quite the opposite. Leasing is a slow bleed, a permanent tap left slightly open.
And those taps, as it turns out, rarely drip in isolation.
Leasing structures are fertile ground for all the little arrangements that never make it into public reports: the well-placed intermediary, the conveniently awarded contract, the advisory role that appears out of nowhere and pays just enough to keep everyone smiling. It’s a system that doesn’t merely spend money—it redirects it, siphoning from the many toward the few who know where to stand when the pipes are laid.
Meanwhile, the original blunder—the purchase that didn’t work, the project that collapsed under its own pretense—quietly dissolves into the past. No autopsy. No reckoning. Because that would require questions, and questions have a nasty habit of leading to names.
Instead, we are handed the usual liturgy.
“We couldn’t have known.”
“We needed the experience.”
“Now we understand and can improve.”
Or, when all else fails: it was the previous administration. A ghost conveniently unavailable for comment, forever responsible, never accountable.
And so the cycle resets. New projects. New spending. New opportunities to repeat the same choreography under slightly different lighting.
Call it what it is: a racket. Not a glitch, not an unfortunate side effect, not a temporary deviation from an otherwise noble system. A racket—cleanly structured, socially accepted, and stubbornly persistent.
Public office becomes a racket.
Representation becomes a racket.
Regulation becomes a racket.
“Service” becomes a racket.
An entire ecosystem where incentives align not with outcomes, but with continuity—of spending, of influence, of plausible deniability.
Of course, we like to believe this can be fixed. That with the right reforms, the right people, the right surge of civic virtue, the machinery can be recalibrated into something honest.
Maybe.
But belief is cheap. The system isn’t.
Good luck with that.