The Bureaucrat is one of the most fearsome creatures on Earth.
Lacking a conscious, he or she carries out orders with little regard for the consequences of such actions.
The faceless bureaucrat disregards dissenting opinions, even when such opinions fit the available data better than the opinion of the majority or even when such opinions are predicated on crystal clear common sense.
Bureaucrats treat human beings as impersonal objects, showing callus indifference to the rights and feelings of others.
Indeed, their actions appear almost psychopathically incapable of empathy or feeling.
A bureaucracy under which these robot-like creatures function is most often found in governments, the military, corporations, hospitals, schools, and many other institutions.
The Vatican is a prime example.
The emphasis in this piece is on government bureaucracies (local, state and federal) where Parkinson's Law is practiced with uncommon vigor and enthusiasm.
Parkinson's Law contends that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Government bureaucrats usually want subordinates, but not competitors, to help with "overwork.
" In the field of public administration, it has been widely observed that work tends to increase in importance and complexity in direct proportion with the time to be spent.
Politicians and, frequently, taxpayers (the latter with at least an occasional sense of doubt) have assumed that an increased number of civil servants must be the result of an increased amount of work to be performed.
In his 1966 book, Inside Bureaucracy, Anthony Downs made a number of well publicized and generalized observations about government bureaucracy that help illustrate its inherent futility.
Here are just some: No one can fully control the behavior of a large bureaucracy.
The larger a bureaucracy becomes, the poorer is the coordination among its actions.
[What does this say about the government's war on terror and the effectiveness of the new and gigantic homeland security agency which is the arguably ill-begotten result of the consolidation of several other agencies? More bureaucratic musical chairs but in this case, the end game can be very dangerous] Any attempt to control one large bureaucracy tends to generate another one.
The greater the effort made by top-level bureaucrats to control their subordinates, the greater the efforts made by the subordinates to evade control.
All bureaucrats develop strong loyalty to the organization, as opposed to serving consumers, since that is the source of their job security and promotion.
As a bureaucracy grows, the level of talent initially rises and then declines As bureaucracies grow older, their top officials shift their focus from performing "social functions" to ensuring the institution's budgetary growth.
[God forbid if you are a "whistle blower.
"] Each bureaucrat tends to distort the information he passes upward in the hierarchy, exaggerating those data that are favorable to him, and ignoring those that are critical.
He also tends to tell his superiors only what he thinks they want to hear, which is not necessarily consistent with reality.
Each bureaucrat will comply with those directives from his superiors that serve his own self interests, and will subvert those that don't.
In any large bureaucracy a significant amount of what goes on is completely unrelated to the bureau's goals.
As any bureaucracy grows, the proportion of wasted activity rises steadily.
The larger a bureaucracy, the more resistant it will be to any change.
Every bureaucrat is a vigorous propagandist for the expansion of his organization.
Of course, There are monster sized bureaucracies in the private sector but the inefficiencies of corporate bureaucracy are mitigated and impacted by consumer and stock market pressures, the competitive labor market, and free-market competition in general.
These capitalistic variables are nonexistent in government, where bureaucratic failure is perversely rewarded.
The only thing that exists in the government bureaucracy are meaningless and self-serving budgets the amounts of which are determined by politics and arbitrary bureaucratic rules.
Some say we need a strong federal government, but I would ague the exact opposite is true.
The tragedy of September 11 reflected the failure of the entire federal government (and its many agencies such as the CIA , FBI, and Department of Defense to name just a few), to protect American citizens against foreign aggressors.
If this is not the primary role of government, what is? Like a game of bunko played on the streets of New York City, the government's proposals to consolidate national security agencies into one mammoth "Department of Homeland Security" is simply further proof of the Government failure's to "get it.
" As George Van Valkenburg said, "Man creates problems.
Government and bureaucrats magnify them 100 times.
" Clearly, while a bureaucracy should be given enough authority to establish order (at least in my opinion), it should not be allowed to exercise that authority at the expense of diminishing the liberty of the people.
But that's exactly what seems to be happening today.
Thus, the question is: how much should our liberties be diminished, if at all, and for what purposes? So far, the political landscape suggests answers that can only result in the real potential for a dangerous erosion of our constitutional liberties.
It also suggests more bureaucracies (and attendant waste) in perpetuity as the fearsome bureaucrats grow in number and carry out their orders with total loyalty to the organization which nourishes them, but without regard to the consequences their actions have on the people who suffer under such mindlessness.
A speech Newt Gingrich gave at the Nackey S.
Loeb First Amendment Award dinner in December 2006 in New Hampshire included suggestions that due to the ongoing war on terror, new rules might need to be applied to our Constitution to protect the citizens.
He said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.
Newt stated, "Americans who believe as I do that free speech should not be an acceptable cover for people who are planning to kill other people who have inalienable rights of their own.
" I refuse to join those who rush to attach demagoguery to his remarks, and he sounds reasonable enough when he says "we need a serious dialogue -- not knee-jerk hysteria -- about the 1st Amendment...
" However, my concern is that we when have such "serious dialogues," are we not, in fact, losing the so-called war on Terror? Heretofore, these rights were inviolate; they provided the foundation upon which our country was created and upon which it has flourished.
Once we start looking to diminish them, who really wins the war against terrorism? When a someone who meets a certain profile is stopped in the subway and searched, who wins the war? When someone reports his neighbor under the Patriot Act, who wins the war? When a pass port now becomes necessary when returning from a vacation in Canada or the Caribbean, who is winning the war? When freedom of speech is restricted because of the War on Terror, who wins the war? What must the terrorist (whomever and wherever they are) be thinking when these things occur? Now how does all this tie into bureaucrats and the bureaucracy? Well, for one thing, the very nature of the military requires blind loyalty and obedience.
Aldous Huxley said it best, "A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic.
No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
" Need verification, back in the late 30's and early 40's, the bureaucrats faithfully carried out the crimes of the Nazi's to the horror of the entire world.
That they did this with total loyalty to the organization which nourished them, but without regard to the horrific consequences their actions had on the people who suffered under such mindlessness, is historically manifest.
As America continues its war on terrorism, it stands to reason that governmental bureaucrats will be called upon to provide a symbiosis with the military thus giving birth to still more layers of bureaucracy.
New rules may need to be applied.
The Patriot Act, for example, may require more bureaucratic attention.
With the self perpetuation of work which often ends up being a Catch-22 situation, it is not unreasonable to assume that our individual rights and constitutional liberties could well get lost in this mad shuffle.
We should spend more attention on how we can preserve, protect and strengthen those rights rather than talk about diminishing or revising them.
Perhaps the best way to fight the war on terror is to become lean, streamlining and focusing our efforts rather than pouring more money and manpower on the problem in a way that capitulates to what our enemies want.
Maybe it's time we implemented the Reagan-like budget cuts of the past and looked at streamlining the government in a way that optimizes protection of our rights rather than surrendering them.
"We have forgotten in America that a democracy is the most difficult kind of government to maintain.
It is the hardest kind of government under which to live.
It is hardest to maintain because of the widespread political corruption to which it so easily lends itself.
Our drift today toward complete totalitarian bureaucracy is one that threatens immediately the very freedoms for which our own boys are dying.
" Ernest R.
Palen.