From FEE.org:
Bureaucrats have a fixation on numbers and rules. Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, describes this termination point:
The emaciated bodies of the sick were thrown on two-wheeled carts which were drawn by prisoners for many miles, often through snowstorms, to the next camp. If one of the sick men had died before the cart left, he was thrown on anyway—the list had to be correct! The list was the only thing that mattered. A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive—that was unimportant; the life of a “number” was completely irrelevant.
The following words represent the generally acknowledged mindset of a bureaucrat: “Rules are rules, fella. I don’t make ‘em. I just enforce ‘em.”
Rules, Lists, and Paperwork
As Ludwig von Mises has taught us, bureaucracy is not a large, hierarchically structured organization, whether of big government or big business. It is the government’s method of managing its affairs, which means it is the “peaceful” method of managing coercion. Laws of the land, a budget for each bureau, and regulatory rules dictate to citizens what they can and cannot do. Disobedience brings punishment. The method is top-down; the higher authority must be obeyed.
Business management is bottom-up, deriving its legitimacy from customer satisfaction, the only means in a free market of earning profits. Policies, not rules, are guidelines informing everyone in the company, from president to stock clerk, how to function in order to achieve optimal customer satisfaction and therefore optimal profits.
If a large, hierarchically structured business today seems bureaucratic, in the sense of being inefficient and insensitive to customers, look for the government’s demands for compliance to laws and rules. Compliance means obedience to a higher power, which consequently deflects attention from customer needs and wants. This is what makes businesses in a mixed economy take on the “rules are rules” mentality.
So why the bureaucratic indifference to people? Paperwork is the only yardstick bureaucracy has to measure its “success.” Laws and rules are commands that compel citizens to obey, and citizens usually do obey to avoid punishment. Paperwork records the compliance—but it must be correct.
The objective yardstick of a business is its bottom line, profits, which means it is successfully meeting its customer’s needs and wants.
The Bureaucratic Society
A bureaucratic society is a rule-bound society. Freedom and creativity are not valued. (Creativity, after all, means breaking rules.) The more bureaucratic the society, the more rule-bound it will become. The socialist state, therefore, is a society dominated almost entirely by laws and rules. The more laws and rules, the more total the regulation of human affairs, the less value it places on its citizens’ lives.
Total bureaucracy—the totalitarian socialist state—is dictatorship by excessive law. This describes Nazi Germany during World War II, as well as the USSR and many similar regimes in the twentieth century.
The list has to be correct because all paperwork has to be correct. William Shirer made this clear in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when he described gangs of German secretaries dutifully typing orders to send Jewish people to their deaths.
Even a few members of Kerensky’s provisional Russian government, who were discovered by illiterate Bolshevik revolutionaries during the 1917 October Revolution, were compelled to write their own arrest papers. The paperwork had to be correct!
In a bureaucratic society, thought is neither required nor appreciated, only compliance. Thus, paperwork has to be correct for the lower-ranked official to avoid punishment and for the higher to justify his or her actions, by reference to a law or rule.
Concern for the person behind a bureaucratic number is minimal or non-existent. Just ask students at state-run universities what it is like to be a number on a roster. (And the rosters do have to be correct!)
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For more on the relationship between bureaucracy, socialism, and dictatorship, see Mises’ 1944 book Bureaucracy. Here is his one-paragraph summary and conclusion (p. 125):
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau, what an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!
The subject of the article fits nicely with Moore's Laws of Bureaucracy few of which state:
- So a typical bureaucracy with 12 levels has a 99.5 percent chance that one or more sociopaths are in each control path. The actual percentage is somewhat lower because the sensor and effector information paths often overlap.
- So the effectors, who actually deal with the public, will be totally constrained in their behavior by rigid rules. Thus, they will have no heart.
In other words, since bureaucracies don’t see people as individuals but as numbers, stats, etc. people in that bureaucracy will either be sociopaths or slowly become them. Also, according to Moore, bureaucracies are inefficient, big, growing, out-of-control, and immortal—or want to be immortal. I agree. President Trump will find this out if he hasn’t already. Draining-the-swamp will be an uphill battle. Bureaucracies don’t want to die.
If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy; God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't. – Hyman Rickover.
I never saw a bureaucracy produce a single barrel of oil. - Rex Tillerson.
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us. - P. J. O'Rourke.
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