bureaucracy...........................

 

I have always had, no matter the regime (I make no exceptions), a repugnance for bureaucracy. . . . I noticed that, to get ahead, one needed to be pliable and obsequious to those who gave you orders, and duplicitous or violent towards those who take orders from you.  In France, the administrative state does not conduct itself with the general welfare in mind, but only in the interests of those who govern.  And no one can hope to rise in the ranks without subordinating his interests to those of others. . . . And though many things I encountered in my judicial career displeased me, I embraced what seemed to me the only career in civil service that gave me any independence from the transient groups that cycle through power in our country, the only one where one can both be civil servant and oneself.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, from a letter to his nephew Hubert, 1854