Bureaucracy

One cannot merely decree that there be good and affordable medical care for all. Setting up a byzantine bureaucracy won't do the trick either ... If the young and healthy were going to subsidize the already sick, they would have to be forced to buy coverage at inflated prices ... And bureaucrats would have to set minimum standards, or else the mandate would be a mere formality ... [B]ureaucratic rules thus take precedence over personal preferences. It doesn't matter what you want. Personnel at the Department of Health and Human Services and its myriad boards (advised by whom?) know better.

Turgot worked to curtail the rapaciousness of bureaucrats. "People complain also," he wrote, "of the embarrassments they are thrown into by the extreme severity of the penalties, often for the slightest faults. It is indispensable to remedy this, as well as the inconveniences manufacturers suffer from the contradictions in the regulations, and to shield them from the abuse of the authority by the Bureaux of Inspection." Then issuing orders: "You are not to seize anything belonging to them [workers and small manufacturers], any stuff or merchandise, on the pretext of its faultiness ..."

In both [the Democrat and Republican plans], the money would come from the taxpayers and be controlled by the bureaucrats. The Democrats would deal with the drug companies, the Republicans with the HMOs ... The Democrats are honest. They say they want a monster government bureaucracy controlling drug prices and giving orders to the pharmaceutical industry ... The Bush plan, like the Democrats' alternative, still has government in the middle of the medical system. A bureaucracy will control the money. A bureaucracy will set the standards. A bureaucracy will enforce its expectations.

[O]ftentimes judges are ... [biased] toward prosecutors. This is especially true with respect to judges who have assumed the bench after long careers as prosecutors ... Another problem with judges is that over time they become like other government bureaucrats—so encrusted with a mindset of laws, rules, and regulations that they are unable to distinguish law from justice. Steeping themselves every day in the law books, regulatory manuals, briefs, memoranda, oral arguments, and court opinions, what becomes foremost in the mind of most judges is simply, Did the accused break the law?

Under socialism ..., arbitration becomes the business of government, since government is supposed to be the unquestioned reservoir of justice. But the government has no basis for selecting the man who shall have that job, except as some one bureaucrat renders the decision arbitrarily and exercises his own personal choice or preference. Discrimination has not been eliminated; it cannot be eliminated, by the very nature of things. All that has happened has been the transfer of the rights of discrimination to a bureaucrat who has no basic concern—and no fundamental right of choice—in the matter.

Imagine the disruption if Rockwell's cockamamie schemes were put into effect. Why, there would be thousands, no, tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, time servers, nincompoops, wastrels, no wait, I mean great contributors to the economy, tossed out on their ears onto the unemployment lines. This would radically reduce their income. As a result, they would purchase less than before; things like luxury cars, luxury food, luxury bicycles, foreign vacations, jewels, Rolexes, yachts, etc.

Bureaucracy is necessarily hierarchical, first because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and secondly because bureaucracy grows by adding more subordinate layers ... in a rule-bound bureaucracy seniority is often blithely adopted as a proxy for merit. Increasing seniority, then, leads to promotion to higher ranks ... Those bureaucrats who are shrewd analysts of human nature, then, and who understand the way rulers operate, will, if they see that the cherished policy of their President is in grave error, tend to keep their mouths shut, and let some other sucker be the messenger of bad news and get shot down.

To place this in the category of criminal law means that ... the people being investigated are implicitly threatened with jail and other forms of violence. Doesn't it seem that the bureaucratic class is drawn to the latter forms of enforcement? ... The truth is that the people who buy and sell are far more interested in the wellbeing of the public than lifetime bureaucrats who have no professional stake in the outcome of the enterprising process ... Their one and only interest is protecting their power and position. Increasingly, they seize on any and every headline to whip up public frenzy.

[A] certain instinct of orderliness and of self-preservation ... enables multitudes ... to get along after a fashion ... The serious loss in a social order is in time and energy. Sitting around in waiting rooms until one can stand in line before a bureaucrat's desk seems to any American a dead loss, and living in a social order thus shortens every person's life. Outside the bureaucrat's office, too, these regulations for the public good constantly hamper every action. It is as impossible to move freely in one's daily life as it is to saunter or hasten while keeping step in a procession.

16. About how many laws do U.S. legislative bodies, from city councils to Congress, enact each year ...? ... 19. About how much do government regulations cost Americans each year ...? ... 16. According to the late Henry Hazlitt, U.S. legislative bodies enact some 150,000 new laws a year. Estimate is from the 1970s. There's no reason to suppose this number would be lower. Indeed, ... the number seems likely to be higher ... 19. Government regulations cost Americans about $600 billion a year. (See Market Liberalism, a Paradigm for the 21st Century [Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1993], p. 6.)

When a health service is transformed into a government service, add the cost of all the bureaucratic machinery required to run it—all the bureaucrats with their salaries, pensions, annual leaves, sick leaves, and Civil Service–protection making it impossible to fire incompetents—and it gets to be a very high–cost operation. Not surprisingly, it all ends up with lower-quality care at a much higher cost! ... Unfortunately, however, government bureaucracies inherently refuse to retreat from any extension of power they have assumed and are exercising.

For although commercial bankers often err in deciding who to lend to, I believe they are far less likely to do so than a body of government-appointed bureaucrats ... Government bureaucrats ... can usually make bad loans with impunity, or at least without facing any pecuniary losses ...central bankers' lending and investment decisions ... are likely to be heavily influenced by political considerations ... that could prevent even the most savvy and well-intentioned bureaucrats from investing people's savings in ways far removed from those in accord with their long-run best interests.

Bureaucracy mounted a new attack against socialism. Mises explained that private entrepreneurs can delegate considerable responsibility to their managers, because performance is easily measured by profit and loss. But bureaucratic management, which socialists want to run the world, can't be measured by profit and loss. Consequently, rulers limit the discretion of administrators with regulations, and obeying the regulations becomes the supreme standard of conduct ... "... The first virtue of an administrator is to abide by the codes and decrees. He becomes a bureaucrat."

This story is disturbing—and ominous ... Are similar restrictions in store for [seniors]? Will bureaucrats be making rules about what drugs can be taken, for what ailments, in what manner, and administered by whom? There is every reason to think so. When government pays, government controls. And controls tend to expand ... Regardless of how the government provides the coverage, a bureaucracy will gain the power to set the terms for the sale of medicine. When insurance companies and managed-care organizations are dependent on government checks, government officials can call the tune.

Does this mean no one should be permitted to ... trade ... before the regulators understand it? ... Everyone would be held down to the level of bureaucrats who have no incentive, much less ability, to spot promising innovations ... Calling regulators bureaucrats is not just an insult; it's also a description. Bureaucrats are not in the profit-and-loss game ... They don't gain financially from producing value, and they have no capital at risk. As we've learned from the [FDA], they tend to be overcautious because if they might err, it's better to err on the side of not letting something happen.

Is TSA really trying to protect us? Surely that defines part of its mission. But every bureaucracy is self-interested in a way that receives no discouragement within the public sector ... [T]he welfare bureaucracy benefits most by increasing the number of the poor and keeping them that way for as long as possible. Only by maximizing the number of poor people who need assistance can a welfare bureaucracy thrive ... In some way, too ... the security state actually benefits from disastrous mistakes that result in loss of life. These allow the bureaucracy to say: we told you so; we should have had more money and power.

[T]he delusional left ... imagine that if most health care were ... administered by the state, [all] people ... would have equal access. Enlightened public bureaucrats would make the essential decisions about health priorities ... Because bureaucrats have no strong incentive to see to the wellbeing of people, they make decisions based on politics ... We end up with a bureaucratically controlled nightmare in which no class in society receives the level of medical attention it would receive in a marketplace ... [I]n these times, the case for bureaucracy is even more obviously incorrect.

Bureaucrats face perverse incentives compared with those faced by participants in freed markets. The officials who run government agencies have no money at risk, and the people (as taxpayers) have no choice but to put up with them ... Moreover, government agencies are easily subject to regulatory capture, by which the well-connected among the regulated influence or control the regulators ... Real protection would be found in truly worker-based organizations whose rules were not written by a Washington bureaucracy to accommodate the insiders.

Those close to the land—whether in a commercial sense or even in terms of a cause—are far better stewards than bureaucrats, whose management of the 'commons' ensures abuse since they possess few incentives to protect the land. Since their revenues are extracted from the citizenry by the force of taxation, bureaucratic managers have no way of telling whether they administrate resources in ways beneficial to the public or not. ... Guaranteed revenues almost regardless of how they perform, bureaucrats actually have every incentive to mismanage resources in order to justify their jobs and their agency's ever expanded existence.

Any widespread government program rests on ordinary civil servants who staff the halls of bureaucracy and prisons ... These are the people "doing their jobs"; they obey orders and follow the letter of the law without questioning its content ... [T]he law assumes the role that conscience often plays ... [Sophie's] court-appointed defense attorney ... asks no questions and provides no defense at her trial ... At [a] slight stab at the legitimacy of his position, [he] explodes ... consciously [choosing] to hide behind amoral bureaucracy and will not countenance a moral mirror held to his face.