A Thought on the Nature of Bureaucracy and Hope

The one thing bureaucrats never do is push for a reduction in their remit.  All 'failure' is attributed to them not doing 'enough' with not 'enough' money, or not 'enough' power and authority.  They never ever confess that maybe, just maybe, they need not be doing what they are trying to do in the first place.

To sustain this bureaucrats spend inordinate amounts of our wealth (and therefore our time) concocting huge 'analyses' leading to the production of long, and almost unreadable 'reports' that 'prove' their case for expansionism.  These are always couched in the terms like 'protecting the consumer' or 'making markets work better' (the last is self evidently absurd).   They call all this their 'work', but as nothing they do is in anyway connected with the actual process of wealth creation, it is anything but 'work'. At best it is just an activity, like doing jigsaws. At worst it is wealth destruction.

To rebut these self serving nonsenses takes equivalent effort, cash and time. In effect the poor bloody citizen is paying thrice. Once he pays the bureaucrats.  Then he spends his own time (and money) constructing a rebuttal.  And then he has to spend another equivalent gobbet of time making up for the time and money expended on the previous two gobbets.

Individuals stand absolutely no chance of mastering all of the arguments to rebut these bureaucratic dictates.  This encourages bureaucrats to carry on, as they know that they can bog us down in trench warfare.  We end up having to fight them on ground of their choosing.

Until now.

Yesterday I cross-posted on here a post from a Telegraph blog which was a response to something I had written.  I was pretty sure it was mostly cobblers (in the H2G2 sense - that it 'was something almost, but not entirely, quite unlike tea logic').  I couldn't quickly work out how it was wrong, so I cross posted it to here, where it garnered about 25 responses (excluding mine) which quickly revealed the flaws in the arguments.  I sort of crowd sourced the rebuttal.  This took little effort and almost no time at all.  My rebuttal was complete, and time and cost efficient.  It forced the poster to move to the defensive. I had moved the argument to ground of my choosing.  We had left trench warfare and moved out into the open to a battle of manoeuvre.  The attacker had become the defender.

This is very encouraging indeed as I am very concerned that the UK and the West in general is moving towards a grim Randian future that bodes ill for liberty.  But maybe, just maybe, the interweb is redressing the balance.  After all information is power, and if we can all access it, the monopoly of the bureaucrats is broken.

No wonder 'they' want to censor and control it.