Barking Cat
(From "Free To Choose" by Milton Friedman)
What would you think of someone who said, "I would like to have a cat provided it barked"? Your statement that you favor a government provided it behaves as YOU believe desirable is precisely equivalent. The political principles that determine the behavior of government agencies once they are established are no less rigid than the biological principles that determine the characteristics of cats. The way the government behaves and its adverse consequences are not an accident, not a result of some easily corrected human mistake, but a consequence of its nature in precisely the same way that a meow is a consequence of the nature of a cat.