Blaming the government

Sometimes I want to share an article with you primarily for the title. An example is a piece by Thomas Frank "You Can't Starve Government and Blame It Too" . And I'm very glad to see that it was published in the Wall Street Journal. Here's part of what it says:

The regulators did fail us. They were too cozy with industry and too blinkered by the free-market faith to see the reality unfolding under their noses.

But what ought to make conservatives choke is the fact that those failing agencies were also the product of years of conservative governance, with its well-known hostility to bureaucrats and its apparent determination to make federal work unattractive.
...
So this is how it works with conservatives at the helm: We starve government agencies of resources, we keep their employees' pay well below their private-sector counterparts, we make sure they know what we think of them as they wait their turn at the photocopier. Then we demand they protect us when there's a problem with extremely complex financial instruments, whose designers are defended by some of the best-paid lawyers in the world.

I don't know why all this isn't glaringly obvious. And, by the way, I don't like government-worker bashing jokes. They are as offensive to me as racist jokes.