If you haven’t read Walter Russell Mead’s When Government Jumps the Shark, I strongly advise you to. In it, Mr. Mead divides .gov programs up into five distinct stages that I think are brilliant in their concise descriptivity:
- Great White Hope
- Great White Father
- Great White Elephant
- Great White Shark
- Great White Whale
My first exposure to Mr. Mead came from another brilliant essay, The Jacksonian Tradition, which I found via Steven Den Beste many years ago, and I’ve cited it in several pieces here. He’s not lost anything in the ensuing decade.