Bureacrats and their Living November 5, 2007
Posted by ymarsakar in Politics.trackback
I suppose this makes my point for me when I advocated executing corrupt bureacrats before. It is all part of the same package. If you don’t do such things, then eventually the actions of the bureacrats will make you do even more extreme methods. Or you can do nothing and have them collapse your civilization, that can alway swork.
Non-hacker oxygen thieves of no tactical significance.
Speaking about the Department of State of course. Subsunk over at blackfive also gave a rather brutal analysis of the DoS.
I despair of ever reforming the bureaucracy. Government will be the last bastion of it as business and most other forms of human endeavor seek to cut costs and improve efficiency.
Do we really want an efficient government that can do whatever it sets out to do quickly? Inefficient blame-dispersing bureaucracies serve to retard the progress of government implementation both of that which we think is urgently needed now and that which we think is totally stupid.
What could possibly be done, IF the party that is not beholden to the government employees unions comes to power, is change the ratio of political appointees to career Civil Service, or contractors. Whatever party is out of power will seek to use their adherents in the Civil Service to embarrass the Adminstration. The advantages of an “apolitical” tenured bureaucratic class over political appointees is supposedly experience, but what we end up with is a revolving door of short-term political appointee “leaders” whose strings are pulled by the Keepers of the Files. The political appointee is always turned by the bureaucrats, or sandbagged until he is fired for ineffectiveness.
We cannot do entirely without bureaucrats.
But we can make bureaucracies less comfortable places to homestead for decades and encourage old blood to move on and new blood to come in. Contract out more of these functions, and compete each contract, and keep the worthiest bureaucrats as Contracting Officer Representatives.
Inefficient blame-dispersing bureaucracies serve to retard the progress of government implementation both of that which we think is urgently needed now and that which we think is totally stupid.
Yet it also destroys accountability and transparency. How will elected populations know whether the policies and representatives that they have voted in are working or not, so long as bureacrats can make policies fail which they don’t like and cover up for policies which they favor?
The military is apolitical, constant, and very efficient. That is the model which should be used on the bureacrats, although it might be a bit hard on the bureacrats.
Dealing with the bureacracy would be easier if we had an Imperial system based upon land grants. Then we could shape human greed into loyalty or at least predictability.