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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – bureaucracy grows like a cancer All things grow, bacteria, blue whales, businesses and bureaucracies. The difference for the latter is, that the first three must wrench a living from a cold, uncaring world, whereas the latter merely needs to increase taxes.
The bureaucracy grows like a cancer, stealing resources and threatening the viability of its host. Eventually the host, us, starts to ask whether it shouldn’t be reduced to something taxpayers can actually afford. The bureaucracy responds by doing everything in its power to prevent its dismemberment. Join the EU, there’s safety in numbers, import millions of voters to block the right, all while continuing to drain the lifeblood from the economy. It can’t win, of course, either it gets dismantled or the economy collapses. It’s just a matter of what is left afterwards.
– Roué le Jour
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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This building houses the “Cabinet Office Secondary HQ” in Glasgow. I only discovered that such a thing exists the other day, and when I looked up the address, it struck me as the perfect architectural metaphor for the parasitical bureaucratic hollowing out of our once-great country. I’m reminded of David Burge’s line about taking a respected institution, killing it, gutting it, and wearing its remains as a skin-suit, demanding respect.
It’s like one of those ants taken over by a giant parasitical fungus. In every sense of the metaphor.
It is perfectly possible to keep the facade of an old building, and constuct a decent enough new building behind it, but this thing is just an obscenity.
“The bureaucracy responds by doing everything in its power to prevent its dismemberment. Join the EU, there’s safety in numbers, import millions of voters to block the right, all while continuing to drain the lifeblood from the economy.”
You forgot starting a war.
I personally think that “Yes Minister” should be a required course in all British schools. The kids would have a laugh and actually learn something vastly more useful than another dose of Macbeth, the geography of the Congo river, or how to integrate a polynomial.
Good post – it is true.
Only one British Prime Minister in my lifetime has reduced the number of government employees, even as a proportion of employed people, Margaret Thatcher.
The lady did not achieve what she hoped to achieve (sadly no), many “Quangos” and so on remained, but at least the lady achieved something – no other British Prime Minister in the last 60 years has achieved a reduction in the size of government.
And charities.
Stuart Noyes – yes indeed.
Once a charity starts paying staff (it starts with “expenses” and then goes on to wages and benefits) it becomes a bureaucracy like any other – and it also starts to spend much of its time seeking taxpayer funding, the “Non Government Organizations” (NGOs) are very much part of government – often international government.
Nothing to add to this excellent QotD, except to note that bureaucracies grow not only within State executive agencies, but also within businesses.
If you have seen Ford vs Ferrari, you’ll know what i am talking about; although you probably know even if you have not seen said movie.
The difference, of course, is that businesses that collapse under the weight of their internal bureaucracies are (usually) replaced by other businesses producing equivalent or better goods, so the people at large do not suffer for long.
Snorri Godhi – one indeed hopes (yes indeed Sir) that business enterprises that become Corporate bureaucracies collapse, but in these days of Fiat Money (the drip feed of low interest rate money, created by the Central Bank, and put out via the commercial banks) it is not always the case that such vile entities collapse – they may carry on as economic “zombies” – indeed get bigger as they buy up other enterprises.