THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF BUREAUCRACY

These rules were originally magically delivered by Apoxia, the Egyptian god of governments to his priests on the famous Theban Scrolls of Bureaucratic Complexity. They were found by a lost American tank crew during World War I in the Hatshepsut Auxilliary Legal Library when a German shell accidentally uncovered the entrance during a brief skirmish outside the ruins of Memphis (Egypt not Tennessee). The Scrolls have been preserved ever since in a file drawer next to the water cooler in the Department of Retired Federal File Clerk Benefits in the basement of the Sam Rayburn Building in Washington, DC.  It is an enlightening document.

Rules of Bureaucracy: #1
It is easier to fix the blame than to fix the problem.

Rules of Bureaucracy: #2
A penny saved is an oversight.

Rules of Bureaucracy: #3
Information deteriorates upward.

Rules of Bureaucracy: #4
The first 90% of the task takes 90% of the time; the last 10% takes the other 90%.

Rules of Bureaucracy: #5
Experience is what you get just after you need it.

Rules of Bureaucracy: #6
For any given large, complex, hard-to-understand, expensive problem, there exists at least one short, simple, easy, cheap wrong answer that winds up costing three times the original estimate.

Rules of Bureaucracy: #7
Anything that can be changed will be, until time runs out and a new change can be proposed restarting the cycle.

Rules of Bureaucracy: #8
To err is human; to shrug is civil service. To call it a triumph and take credit is politics.

Rules of Bureaucracy: #9
There’s never enough time to do it right, but there’s always enough time to do it over and recommend a budget increase.

Rules of Bureaucracy: #10
Preserve Thyself!

 © 2017 by Tom King

Throw the Bums Out - Why It Won't Work.

Every election that comes around we get mad and threaten to throw the bums out for the good of the nation. The problem is that we talk about it, but never do it and it wouldn't do any good if we did.

All this talk about throwing out the congress and replacing it as though that would do any good is little more than hot air. It wouldn't work. There's only one cure for the bloated, chronically ineffective government we've saddled ourselves with.

We'd have to fire literally millions of government bureaucrats to accomplish such a transformation and that isn't going to happen. Not ever! Bureaucrats are a persistent parasite on the backside of society. They accumulate like barnacles on the bottom of a ship. Over the course of years they become such a huge mass that the ship of state inevitably sinks under the dead weight of too many "officials". It's why even a benign government that starts our lean and effective, inevitably collapses under it's own weight. 

So why don't we do something about it? There's no effective way to rid a society of its bureaucrats. Even if the people realize what's going on and pressure their leaders to do something about it, the politicians will try to solve the problem by first appointing a commission to study the issue and then, "surprise", the commission hires more bureaucrats to study why there are too many bureaucrats.

And if the ship of state does sink, if it blows up or burns down, the bureaucrats will survive, like the proverbial cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust. They will rise from the ashes and seek out new masters to serve them.

Reminds me of what Tolkien said about "fighting the long defeat".

Just One Man's Opinion,

T.W. King

Top Five Reasons Obamacare Won't Save Us From Big Pharma

"It'll save money. Yeah, lot's of money. It'll save, uh
TRILLIONS of dollars. Yeah, that's the ticket!"

Obamacare is supposed to save us from evil corporate medical corporations, Big Insurance and Big Pharma!  Here's why it won't.

1. The Locus of Evil:  If big medical, big insurance and big pharmaceuticals are all evil, why is big government miraculously not evil.
2. Depantsing the Consumer:  In one stroke Obamacare turns the consumer from a customer into a commodity. By removing free market forces the government takes away the only tool consumers have to control prices (voting with their feet) and replaces free markets with top down price controls.  Historically that never works. Nixon tried it and nearly killed the economy. Carter tried it and did!
3. Empowering the Big Guys:  It is far easier to bribe government officials than it is to bribe 300 million consumers.  Now that we are being forced by the government to buy a product (medical insurance), the giant corporations that are supposed to be so evil don't have to do marketing studies or offer deals to attract customers.  They merely have to offer trips to Tahiti and all expense paid conferences in Las Vegas to the right government officials to get the price protections they want.
4. DeCapitalizing Healthcare:  By killing free market forces altogether, medical providers no longer have to make their customers happy.  Their customers have to make the medical providers and their government handlers happy in order to get services.  This was explained to me once by a public transit official as the difference between private and public transportation. The same principle applies to "public" healthcare.
5. A Falling Tide Sinks All Boats:  The idea that forcing everyone to pay for medical "insurance" will cover anecdotal problems like pre-existing conditions and unusual medical problems is simplistic and wrong.  Forcing everyone into the insurance market merely covers the cost of all that government supervision that will be added on to the cost of medical care.  The continued problem of unusual and expensive medical conditions will merely force reductions in the quality of care of all consumers.  Socialism's great strength is in its ability to share misery equally among everyone (except of course for the leaders who get a better deal because they are smarter and wiser and we couldn't get along without them or at least that's their story and they're sticking to it.

And like this post which promises ten reasons in the link, but delivers half what it promised, Obamacare is pretty well guaranteed to deliver far less than it promises too.

© 2013 by Tom King

When Drones Could Be of Real Use, the Feds Ground Them?

Picture courtesy of RT - Sill from Youtube Video

Colorado Flood Areas:  Apparently FEMA has grounded volunteer drone operators working the floods in Colorado.  I wonder what genius bureaucrat came up with that idea? 

Well that makes sense in a government reverse parallel universe kind of way.  When lives are at stake and drones could actually be useful in helping find stranded people and save livestock and property, FEMA wants them all grounded. Isn't that what happened in New Orleans after Katrina?  The government actually tried to block volunteers from bringing relief into New Orleans days before the government got around to doing it themselves.

You know I hate conspiracy theories, but you just know somebody's going to find a way to blame the flooding on some secret government project that FEMA is trying to hide from prying eyes. I can hear them now.

Conspiracy theorists give the government credit for a lot of intelligence. To me this grounding of drones by FEMA smacks, not of some brilliant conspiracy so much as it does of bureaucratic stupidity and turf protection.  The last thing FEMA bureaucrats want people to know is that we can do things as citizens to rescue ourselves and our neighbors without including them and often better than they do it.

Which brings us back to why I think government should be smaller and less intrusive.  We're big boys and girls.  We can do things for ourselves.

© 2013 by Tom King

There's Nothing More Dangerous Than a Panicked Bureaucrat

In times of crisis, government functionaries
excrete massive piles of paperwork

 Government Programs Are Immortal
© 2013 by Tom King

I received an email from the Social Security Administration last week advising me that it's easier than ever to draw a disability check when you're in your 50s. This week I saw a news story reporting a sudden surge in applications for disability.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

The same thing happened about 13 years ago in Texas when local efforts by food banks and churches to provide food to the hungry through church food pantries were blamed for an $800,000 budget cut in the federal appropriation for the Federal Food Stamp program. The Food Stamp office in Texas started a $300,000 "Food Stamps are not part of welfare reform" advertising campaign and "Surprise!", food stamp apps went up again, wiping out what East Texas conservatives had seen as a tangible gain in the war on hunger.

Apparently, the SSDI folk have instructions to ramp up the number of Americans on disability.  Maybe all that Obamacare we haven't got yet has cured or prevented too much disability and the department was in danger or getting its appropriation cut.

This is why new government bureaucracies are forever. Once a government bureaucracy is created, I've yet to see one "Go gently into that good night" when it was no longer needed. And woe unto you if you threaten their existence in any way or do anything which might make them irrelevant. They will come after you.  It's not accident that people, who have made some government agency or functionary angry, will joke half-seriously about getting a vengeful tax audit. We've already learned just how likely that is with the recent IRS scandals.

We meddle... People don't like to be meddled with.
We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk.
We're in their homes and in their heads, and we haven't
the right. We're meddlesome..   - River Tam (from Firefly)

I still maintain that part of the reason the TV series Firefly was canceled was because it criticized big government's "meddling in people's lives".  Such a thing cannot be allowed, not even by a science fiction TV show.  Look how many socialist and totalitarian countries banned the release of the followup movie "Serenity".  Bureaucrats are danged touchy when you criticize them.

Voltaire said that "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." It's a thing Joss Whedon, an avowed "progressive" and the creator of the Firefly series, seems to have difficulty getting his head around. He believes in progressive-socialist principles, but he still manages to criticize them in his TV shows and movies and to draw down the wrath of the "true believers". Whedon even has the audacity to point out how very dangerous are the true believers, who wholly and without question embrace the power of government as the only means to change people, to make them good and to create a "better world".  The true believers do not like that sort of thing. I know, having been set upon by true believers during my advocacy career. Whedon has this kind of split personality about his own beliefs and the beliefs of his characters as he approaches the idea of personal liberty. It's why his work has so many fans on the right and critics on the left, despite the fact that he keeps telling the left, "Hey, I'm with you guys."

Finally, if you don't believe in the immortality of Earthly things or you're one of those true believers, who does believe in the inherent goodness of government, try and close down a government bureaucracy sometime. It's an eye-opening experience. Bureaucrats are a mighty vengeful lot when you threaten them and they hang on to life and power with a tenacity that is breath-taking.

The plague-like almost biological persistence of government in and of itself explains why God will have to one day burn the whole place down, if He is going to successfully clean the Earth up and establish a truly better world.  I personally think God won't have to so much as strike a match. I believe the whole rotten mess will soon spontaneously combust like a big pile of oily rags in a hot garage.

Tom King

The Bigger the Government, the More Petty Its Tyrannies

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Paul Gleiser, owner of KTTB radio in Tyler, Texas wrote an interesting piece in his regular column "You Tell Me Texas" about the petty tyranny of big government.  Paul experienced the joy of getting past customs officials and talked about how everyone submitted to delays and officious behavior from officials whose sole job was to check your papers and stamp your passport so you could get on to your connecting flight. When someone started to complain everyone hushed him up lest the official punish the whole group for its insolence by making the line go even more slowly.

I've spent nearly 4 decades in the nonprofit sector working in education and mental health. It was my experience of government during that career that turned me into a small government conservative.  I can't tell you how many times I've witnessed petty bureaucrats playing the game of "officiousness" with citizens they were hired to serve. 

You go to a desk or window, behind which sits a sour-faced career bureaucrat whose entire job is to take a piece of paper that you fill out and process it, add a stamp or something and tuck it into a file drawer somewhere.  With the advent of the computer, it's only gotten worse because now this bureaucrat has to type your form into a computer before he can file it.  They often leave you standing there waiting impatiently while they slowly and carefully type the entire form.  They do not dismiss you until they are done with the retyping the form and it has been accepted by the system. If some tiny little thing is wrong with the way you filled in the little boxes, you will likely be treated to a lecture regarding your weakness of character in having written out the full name of your state in line 22, paragraph 3, subsection 255A, when Section III, subsection 2, Line 5 of the "Instructions for Filling Out Request for Department of Administrative Affairs Approval to Install Widgets on Websites with Links to Official State Archived Documents" clearly states, "State names shall be entered on line 22, paragraph 3, subsection 255A as two letter United States Postal Service standard state abbreviations in all capital letters"

AND You will not be released to return to your actual real life until you have made the required obeisance to this priest of the temple of government bureaucracy and satisfied his lust for relevance. They do not like it when you laugh or sneer at them or express your frustration or anger in any way and can and will find a thousand ways to punish you for any perceived disrespect.

In a sane world, bureaucrats would soon become an endangered species.

Tom King

It's Not Greed - It's How Business Survives the Pressure to Centralize

(c) 2012 by Tom King

A friend sent me this link to an article about the practice of medical systems buying up doctors' private practices.  http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/12/23/4505491/as-hospitals-buy-practices-billed.html

He wrote above the article:  "Pure Unadulterated Greed". 

The article started like this:

By Fred Schulte
Center for Public Integrity

After Vermont hospitals started buying up local doctors’ practices, state Sen. Kevin Mullin of Rutland began hearing complaints that some patients were paying much more for routine care.

 

I disagree. I don't think it's so much greed as it is the added cost of centralizing any bureaucracy. Nobody seems to understand that any time you add layers on top of any organization, that those layers cost money.  I don't think the medical systems are necessarily greedy any more than are the doctors who sell their practices.  I think it's just the good old capitalist, free market system's response to outside pressures on independent physicians.  For years we've been hearing that independent physician's practices are disappearing.  Where did people think they were going anyway?

There are very good reasons for doctors to sell their practices and very good reasons for hospitals to buy them. Spiraling regulatory requirements layered on willy nilly by the government and mounting medical malpractice lawsuits, driven by TV lawyers (the real parasites in my opinion) promising to win the sue 'em till they squeal lottery for anybody whose doctor visit didn't turn out the way they had imagined.

Let's face it, doctors want to practice medicine, not accounting, law or tag-you're-it with government regulators.  To doctors, selling their practices to large medical systems with teams of accountants and lawyers and compliance officers just makes good sense.

And yes, it drives up your doctor bills.  How else are they going to pay for all those new federal employees Obama just hired and all those commercials by all those ambulance chasing lawyers and all those tax accountants it takes nowadays to keep a medical practice going.  It's much easier for doctors to sell out and have the gigantic health care system protect them from all those bureaucratic predators and buying practices is a way for health care systems to pay for all the accountants, lawyers and compliance officers they need to run their hospitals. 

THAT's why I find centralizing or worse yet, governmentalizing any business sector to be a very BAD idea.  I don't like paying for people who basically sit in offices generating paperwork for each other, making things ever more complex and hard to do and charging us poor schmuck consumers for services I never asked for and personally find worse than useless.

Just my opinion.

Tom

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