Sunday, April 21, 2013

Bureaucracies

The practical consequences of the Administrative State are limited not only by legal and constitutional considerations, but by less arbitrary ones as well. Bureaucracies quite simply, and as a general rule, get worse the longer they exist. This is because they are subject to corrupting incentives that cannot be changed by “law”:



- Everyone likes things that make their jobs easier; give bureaucrats discretion and they will use it to make their jobs easier, even if it frustrates the purposes of those jobs in the first place.


- Turf guarding. Bureaucracies have survival instincts, and these affect their operation. Give bureaucracies discretion and they will expand as a matter of self-preservation and self-perpetuation, regardless of the public benefit or detriment.


- Insularity. Stuff a bureaucrat into a life tenure and his or her world gradually shrinks to the limits of the bureaucratic fiefdom. The external becomes the extraneous, and bureaucracies become unmoored from the common interest.


- Loss of proportion. Bureaucracies breed petty tyrants, for whom authority becomes a substitute for common sense.


-Risk aversion. Bureaucracies become more and more intolerant of risk as they age, to the point that obscuring responsibility, dodging accountability and suppressing any activity that may require a tough decision eventually become the guiding principles.


These influences arise from common psychology, rather than any particular ideology or political philosophy. All “administrative states” eventually become inefficient, sclerotic, senseless, abusive and obsolete. The more authority that is delegated to them, the faster they become so.

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