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

death spiral.......................

 

Career advancement required becoming a better bureaucrat, not devising new products or identifying new markets.

-Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

grounds.............................

 

The civil service can never be placed on a satisfactory basis until it is regulated by law. For the good of the service itself, for the protection of those who are intrusted with the appointing power against the waste of time and obstruction to the public business caused by the inordinate pressure for place, and for the protection of incumbents against intrigue and wrong, I shall at the proper time ask Congress to fix the tenure of the minor offices of the several Executive Departments and prescribe the grounds upon which removals shall be made during the terms for which incumbents have been appointed. 

-James A. Garfield, as excerpted from his March 4, 1881 Inaugural Address

On moving fast and breaking things............

 But the argument I have heard recently that is more likely to resonate with the Democrat's traditional (read: sane) base is something like "we are all for explorations of government efficiency but think it needs to be done in a much more measured and careful way." Unfortunately, for anyone with any experience in organizational cost cutting, a "measured pace" is another way of saying "let's move slow enough so the antibodies in the system have time to kill us." As a result, if anything, I think DOGE is moving too slow.

-Warren Meyer, at the Coyote Blog

Be careful what you.......................

 

.................................................defend.

more closely confined.................

 

     While he was an early advocate for administrative power, Justice William O. Douglas explained that later in life he came to "realize that Congress defaulted when it left it up to an agency to do what the 'public interest' indicated should be done. 'Public interest' is too vague a standard to be left to free-wheeling administrators.  They should be more closely confined to specific ends or goals."  But that wish, too, seems now a world away.  If laws governing major facets of our society were once largely the work of elected representatives and the product of democratic compromises, nowadays they often represent only the current thinking of relatively insulated agency officials in a distant city.  It's a result that, as Justice Willliam J. Brennan, Jr., once observed, can post a quandary:  "Whereas the colonists challenged the king, today's citizens may find it impossible to know exactly who is responsible."

-Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law

Ah, democracy...................

 

A “democracy” where unelected bureaucrats have effective veto power is not a real democracy. 

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Ed. Note:  The history major in me bristles when I hear people talking about the U.S. as a democracy.  I suspect the Founding Fathers would share my bristles.  They created, and we should still be considered, a constitutional republic, which is a very different animal from a democracy.  Having said that, if you substitute "constitutional republic" for "democracy" in the above quote, the quote is still true.

Compare this...................

In its early Buffett years, Berkshire had a big task ahead: turning a tiny stash into a large and useful company. And it solved that problem by avoiding bureaucracy and relying much on one thoughtful leader for a long, long time as he kept improving and brought in more people like himself. 

Compare this to a typical big-corporation system with much bureaucracy at headquarters and a long succession of CEOs who come in at about age 59, pause little thereafter for quiet thought, and are soon forced out by a fixed retirement age.

-Charlie Munger, as culled from here

He'd love it today.......................

     Edison had come to despise government bureaucrats, seeing them as a blight on democracy.  In his disgust he had turned down a medal for his defense work, arguing that he deserved it no more than any other member of the Naval Consulting Board.  He said he had lost interest in weapons of war—not to mention respect for the patent and copyright clause of the U. S. Constitution, "and the other 27,946 books filled with laws."

-Edmund Morris, Edison 

Intuition.......................

 But my intuition is that the main problem in the U.S. economy is that too many highly educated people work for government and for non-profits, where they mostly make trouble for the productive sector.

-Arnold Kling, from here

Wishful thinking.............

      Throughout the eighteenth century, as we have seen, liberal intellectuals had looked forward to a new republican world in which corrupt monarchial diplomacy, secret alliances, dynastic rivalries, and balance of power would be abolished.  Since the dynastic ambitions, the bloated bureaucracies, and the standing armies of monarchies were related to the waging of war, the elimination of monarchy promised the elimination of war.  War, said Paine, "from its productiveness, as it easily furnishes the pretense of necessity for taxes and appointments to places and offices, becomes a principal part of the system of Old Governments, and to establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches."  Monarchies encourage war simply "to keep the spirit of the system."  The reason republics were not plunged into the waging of war was the "the nature of their Government does not admit of an interest distinct to that of the Nation."  A world of republican states would encourage a peace-loving diplomacy, one based on the natural concert of international commerce.  If the people of the various nations were left alone to exchange goods freely among themselves—without the corrupting interference of selfish, warmongering monarchial courts, irrational dynastic rivalries, and the secret double-dealing diplomacy of the past—the, it was hoped, international politics would be republicanized and pacified.

Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters:  What Made The Founders Different, as taken from his chapter, Thomas Paine, America's First Public Intellectual

Risk-takers.......................

  Risk-takers challenge the comfortable warmth of the status quo; they are willing to trade their potential within the hierarchy for accepting a degree of responsibility the bureaucracy has decided to find distasteful. Even legitimate risk-takers disturb the hierarchy because they refuse to "stay in the box." And there’s no risk-taking, or Auftragstaktik, in the box.

-from this post at The Hammock Papers

On the separation of intent from reality.....

 The administrative state may operate in a bubble where blatantly bad ideas receive little or no substantial pushback. State officials seem disconnected from reality when they issue arbitrary orders that are unlikely to make a difference when applied in the real world.

-Michael Van Beek, as culled from here

via

Bureaucracy.....................

 Bureaucracy is a permanent decoupling of activity from morality. A bureaucrat isn’t paid to understand the rules he enforces or the forms he is required to have you fill out. There is no “why” involved in his life, and so he allows no common sense or flexibility to inform his actions. Bureaucracy is there for its own sake; it is its own justification. Bureaucrats are often called civil servants, but in reality they provide no service at all: It is you, the individual citizen, who must come to serve them, to follow their instructions, to bend the knee and do exactly what they say, as a token of submission to the powers that be. Otherwise no license, no permit, no job.

-Dan Gelernter, from this post

thanks

Autonomy.........................

     Years after his initial work on the Dymaxion Vehicle, Fuller would theorize that the core of the problem obstructing progress on such a vehicle was a condition he had faced many times during his career and which he perceived as a continuing impediment to humanity's advancement.  That single issue is the bureaucratic drive for power and control that pervades any organization, especially governments.  Both the Dymaxion House and the Dymaxion Vehicle were conceived to function autonomously.  Once built and installed, they would require no roads, airports, electrical power lines, plumbing and sewage connections, or any of the other links through which corporations and governments control individual human beings' lives.
     Bucky eventually realized that if such autonomous innovations were publicly available, independent-thinking humans would quickly discover that the bureaucracies dominating their lives were no longer necessary or useful. . . .
     Because of the formidable opposition he received from power structures, Fuller also realized that the officials who dominate other individuals through bureaucracies and who prosper from their power would resort to extremes in blocking any innovation which would provide individuals with more autonomy and freedom.   Still, he envisioned a new era in which responsibility for maintaining basis human needs would shift from governments and other institutions to individuals themselves . . .

-Lloyd Steven Sieden,  Buckminster Fuller's Univers:  His Life and Work


photo (and more info) via

Subsidiarity..............................

"People should learn to deal with a world, which since the Fall of Man has been demonstrably imperfect.  They should  'cultivate their gardens.'"

-David Warren, as extracted from this Too Big to Succeed essay

subsidiarity defined here 

The differences.......................

... Mr Baumol's primary intellectual focus was the entrepreneur, whose role was badly neglected by prevailing economic theories.  This he reckoned was an intolerable omission.  The differences between rich countries and poor ones rests on differences in their uses of technology, he argued, and that it is through enterprising individuals and firms that innovations go from the drawing board to active use across an economy.  Business theories, he lamented, inevitably treated people as automatons, rather than potential revolutionaries.
     Mr Baumol did better, casting entrepreneurs as crafty strivers dedicated to raising their personal status, who plot their course in life based on the incentives they face.  Policy determines whether that means climbing the bureaucracy of founding Microsoft.

-as taken from this Free Exchange essay in The Economist

Insulation.........................

"Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

cartoon via

Highlights................................

Robert M. Gates,  A Passion For Leadership:  Lessons On Change And Reform From Fifty Years Of Public Service

Saul Alinsky.............................

..........................would probably approve.  John Kay suggests "the characteristics of organisational failure are timeless" and then he sets out the field manual.   A wee excerpt:

 "The wide exercise of power without responsibility, often in the name of democracy or participation, is at best a recipe for organisational paralysis and at worst a mechanism for actual sabotage, as is the substitution of procedural rules for individual judgment."