Texas Taxpayers Have Become Captives of Their Civil Servants

In Jonathan Swift's classic fable, Gulliver's Travels, a shipwreck maroons Lemuel Gulliver, the ill-fated crew's sole survivor, on a remote island (Lilliput) inhabited by people only six inches tall. Upon reaching shore, the exhausted Gulliver falls asleep, unaware of the island's tiny occupants. When he awakens, he finds himself helplessly bound by a web of string, with which the puny creatures—called Lilliputians—have tied him to the ground. So it is that highly focused public employees can come to dominate the much larger group of taxpayers they supposedly serve, especially if—like Gulliver—the taxpayers fail to apprehend the threat until it is too late.