Quotes About Bureaucracy

enumeró las características fundamentales de las organizaciones burocráticas: puestos de trabajo específicos, con derechos, obligaciones, responsabilidades y límites a su autoridad, detallados y bien conocidos, así como un sistema claro de supervisión, subordinación y unidad de mando. Estas

As the historian William McNeill observed, "Innumerable bureaucratic structures that had previously acted more or less independently of one another in a context of market relationships coalesced into what amounted to a single national firm for waging war"—a process that played out in every combatant nation.18

La desvinculación del poder y el tamaño, y por tanto la desvinculación de la capacidad de usar el poder con eficacia y el control de una gran burocracia weberiana, está transformando al mundo. Y esa separación suscita una idea preocupante: si el futuro del poder está en la perturbación y la interferencia y no en la gestión ni la consolidación, ¿podemos confiar en que alguna vez vuelva a haber estabilidad?

Cuando se lleva a cabo la burocratización total de una administración —concluía—, se establece una forma de relación de poder que es prácticamente inquebrantable.»

sin una organización fiable y competente, o —por usar sus términos— sin una burocracia, era imposible ejercer verdaderamente el poder.

A US firm with a large "government affairs" division dedicated to lobbying politicians in Washington, a Russian company founded by an oligarch with personal friendships in the Kremlin, and an Indian company finding its way through the tangle of decades-old licensing and bureaucratic requirements face drastically different regulatory environments from one another, let alone from a start-up seeking to enter an industry for the first time.

The decoupling of power from size, and thus the decoupling of the capacity to use power effectively from the control of a large Weberian bureaucracy, is changing the world.

Society is ruled by the harsh maxim: "production for the sake of production." The decline from craftsman to worker, from an active to an increasingly passive personality, is completed by man qua consumer—an economic entity whose tastes, values, thoughts and sensibilities are engineered by bureaucratic "teams" in "think tanks." Man, standardized by machines, is reduced to a machine.

Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State—the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility)—must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.8, 9 Of

Furthermore, those seeking government privileges, or lucrative posts in the bureaucracy, perform an economic role entirely different from that of people genuinely engaged in trade; those so engaged oppose interference with their trade. It is highly misleading to lump the two together into the term "merchants.

This sets the wheels of government moving in reverse gear; the servant becomes the master, and the right to earn a living becomes subject to the servant's whim and caprice as he professes to apply some vague and variable statutory standard.

What would George Washington—whom the Senate declared didn't need its approval to dismiss Senate-confirmed executive-branch officers, since he alone was responsible to the voters for their actions—have to say about the civil service rules and union protections that make the whippersnappers so difficult, and often impossible, to fire? Even Franklin Roosevelt thought bureaucrat unions an absurdity.41

Paperwork is a creation of the modern world. Do you think they had paperwork four hundred years ago - no, all they had was love & witnesses.

I am very tired of this Government, which I have never seen, and which is always insisting that I must do disagreeable things, and does no good to anybody.

He railed at ecclesiastical bureaucracy, particularly the theological hairsplitting and heresy-hunting that had come to characterize Presbyterian conclaves: "These things in the Presbyterian church, their contentions and janglings are so ridiculous, so wicked, so outrageous, that no doubt there is a jubilee in hell every year, about the time of the meeting of the General Assembly."8

The greater the power and extent of the state, the more room there is for corruption.

The Internal Revenue Code cannot simply be "fixed," which is amply demonstrated by more than 35 years of attempted tax code reform, each round resulting in yet more complexity and unrelenting, page-after-page, mind-numbing verbiage (now exceeding 54,000 pages containing more than 2.8 million words).

Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear.

Large institutions such as the Pentagon, the Internal Revenue Service, and multinational corporations tell us that their decisions are made on the basis of solutions generated by computers, and this is usually good enough to put our minds at ease or, rather, to sleep. In any case, it constrains us from making complaints or accusations. In part for this reason, the computer has strengthened bureaucratic institutions and suppressed the impulse toward significant social change.

A bureacrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battary of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he may never have been asked to answer for his actions.

Bureaucrats -- monkeys who hear no evil and see no evil -- are first in line for promotion.

A mere forty years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about.

To be fair, what looks like conspiracy often turns out to be bureaucracy.

Wonderful. Save the world, and all it earns you is suspicion and surveillance. Par for the course for IDF, Granger thought, grimly. It was a wonder Earth still existed after not one, but two alien invasions, given the level of rampant bureaucracy and mistrust and general incompetency. But