"If there’s one thing in scandalously short supply in local government—shorter even than pothole repair crews—it’s thinking."

"Let’s imagine, for a moment, that the Selwyn District Council—or any local council, really—sits down for its annual budget meeting. Around the table: spreadsheets, solemn faces, and that quietly menacing phrase, “We have no money.” Ordinarily, this is the cue for the whole exercise to shift gears into a grim little theatre where the actors, trained over decades in the art of bureaucratic despair, start explaining why the only answer is to raise rates yet again. But Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand’s own Nobel Prize–winning atom-splitter, had a rather different view. 'We have no money,' he once said, 'therefore we have to think.' ...
    "Rutherford’s logic flips the frame. No money? Good. Now you’re forced to think. And if there’s one thing in scandalously short supply in local government—shorter even than pothole repair crews—it’s thinking."

~ Zoran Rakovic from his post 'Councils' addiction to addition. Or "we have no money, therefore we will have to think"'