Given enough time, the primary function of any bureaucracy becomes the employment of its employees.
- Daniel Hannan ruminates on the gap between what people think that NGOs do, and what NGOs do.
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Samizdata quote of the dayJuly 25th, 2011 |
 5 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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I first ran across this sentiment as Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
Perhaps the most thorough description of the “anatomy” of bureaucracies in modern literature is to be found in Gordon Tullock’s The Politics of Bureaucracy (1965), which is still available from Liberty Fund as Bureaucracy vol 6 of the selected works of Gordon Tullock (which also includes his related Economic Hierarchies, Organiztion and The Structure of Production).
This reference is not meant suggest superiority over other studies of equal significance but of a differing perpspective.
Harmonic convergence – I watched Brazil earlier tonight.
What Eric said.
Professor Parkinson said much the same thing fifty years ago.
Plus ca change…
You’ve got three options – be part of the apparatus, a torpid beneficiary of its works, or be in a prison/gulag/camp. And that’s as it stands now. We have the future to look forward to when such subtleties will melt away into a “comforting” singularity.