A federal bureaucrat is an unelected agent of the US government whose job is to administer the budgets and laws approved by congress, the policies of the president, and the decisions of the courts. State and local bureaucrats perform similar functions
The word “administer” is a synonym of “manage,” which means to plan, implement, and control actions to achieve a goal. Bureaucrats plan, implement, and control actions that require compliance to the laws, regulations, and rules of the various government agencies. The 400-plus regulatory agencies of the national government more specifically make, execute, and adjudicate regulations and rules that tell citizens—individuals and businesses—what they can and cannot do.
Congress has delegated its authority, allegedly as a “division of labor,” to those 400-plus regulatory agencies. Those agencies, however, perform the legislative, executive, and judicial functions of government in one organization. As such, they violate the separation of powers clause of the US Constitution. Some of these agencies even have their own police forces.
The business manager of a private company, in contrast, plans, implements, and controls actions, which may include the execution of policies of higher management, to earn a profit for the company through customer satisfaction.
The distinction comes from Ludwig von Mises: bureaucratic management, the former, versus profit management, the latter. Businesses differ fundamentally from governmental bureaus. The primary constituency of the bureaucrat is his or her superiors in the government, and I include college professors at government-run universities. The primary constituency of business managers is the paying customers.
To the extent that a private business comes under, and therefore must comply with, federal regulations and rules, it will be bureaucratic, that is, take on the characteristics of a typical bureau of the government. The company’s attention is deflected from customer satisfaction to earn or increase profit to satisfaction of the bureaucratic regulations and rules, often requiring extensive paperwork. The attitude of many, though not all, bureaucrats is, as I have written before, and only somewhat caricatured, is “Rules are rules, fella. I don’t make ‘em. I just enforce ‘em.” To this statement, I should have added, “And you must comply with the rules lest you suffer fines and imprisonment.”
Highly regulated, usually large, businesses, as a result, care less about the satisfaction of customers than the satisfaction of government bureaucrats. Hence, the many lobbyists wining and dining federal and state government workers. Smaller, less regulated, businesses, including many startups, continue to aim for customer satisfaction.
The constituency of college professors in government-run universities—I taught at three and attended one, for graduate school—is other faculty, administrators, and, ultimately, the state capitol where the money, especially paychecks, is dispensed and the governance of education resides. Students? As paying customers? Are you kidding me? as far too many professors would say. Do you remember any professors with this attitude? “Can’t talk now [during posted office hours]. I have a meeting with faculty.”
To emphasize the difference between public and private schooling, one student at a private university informed me as I was apparently walking into class a minute late what each minute of class time was costing him! That is the free market talking and I can think of several (many?) of my own professors I wish I had said something like that to. I was overly concerned about my grades, however, to dare imply criticism of a professor.
Where does socialism and its variants fit into this “file folder” of bureaucracy, to use Ayn Rand’s metaphor for concepts? Socialism, fascism, communism, etc., are total bureaucracies. There may be some private property and businesses—in name only, which is the essence of fascism—but because of the central government’s control over all aspects of our personal and professional lives, which means no free markets or free enterprise, socialist systems administer, that is, plan, implement, and control, every aspect of their citizens’ lives. There is little freedom to think for oneself or no freedom to regulate one’s own life.
Everything in a socialist system is guided and performed by laws, regulations, and rules, which means paperwork, and includes the operations of gulags and death camps.
The so-called democratic socialists, who think they can vote socialism in and give everyone horns of plenty, inevitably are thrust aside by the Hitlers of the world. Why? Because their bureaucratic laws, regulations, and rules (of initiated coercion) become harsher and harsher, arousing opposition in their citizens.
The “democrats” lose their nerve to enforce those various laws and rules, opening the door, as F. A. Hayek pointed out, for the worst to rise to the top—to get things done, that is, to implement and control the socialist agenda. The Hitlers of the world tell the "democrats" to"get out of my way, you wimps."
Anyone who opposes, in word or deed, is jailed or shot.
This brings us to the repost below, new main title (in quotes) added, from December 6, 2016, reprinted in Applying Principles (free pdf here), pp.117–21. Gulags and concentration camps are the endgames of socialism. For another discussion of bureaucracy, see pp. 280–83 in the same book “The Bureaucratic Personality: Similarities to the Criminal Mind?” originally posted November 19, 2014.
"The List Had to be Correct"
The Reductio of Bureaucracy: Totalitarian Dictatorship
The continued expansion of bureaucratic management leads ultimately to totalitarian dictatorship.
Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, describes this termination point:
The emaciated bodies of the sick were thrown on two-wheeled carts which were drawn by prisoners for many miles, often through snowstorms, to the next camp. If one of the sick men had died before the cart left, he was thrown on anyway—the list had to be correct! The list was the only thing that mattered. A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive—that was unimportant; the life of a “number” was completely irrelevant.*In several previous posts I have used the following words to represent the generally acknowledged mindset of a bureaucrat (1, 2): “Rules are rules, fella. I don’t make ‘em. I just enforce ‘em.”
Rules, lists, and paperwork. This is bureaucracy.
As Ludwig von Mises has taught us, bureaucracy is not a large, hierarchically structured organization, whether of big government or big business. It is the government’s method of managing its affairs, which means it is the “peaceful” method of managing coercion. Laws of the land, a budget for each bureau, and regulatory rules dictate to citizens what they can and cannot do. Disobedience brings punishment. The method is top-down; the higher authority must be obeyed.**
Business management is bottom-up, deriving its legitimacy from customer satisfaction, the only means in a free market of earning profits. Policies, not rules, are guidelines informing everyone in the company, from president to stock clerk, how to function in order to achieve optimal customer satisfaction and therefore optimal profits.
If a large, hierarchically structured business today seems bureaucratic, in the sense of being inefficient and insensitive to customers, look for the government’s demands for compliance to laws and rules. Compliance means obedience to a higher power, which consequently deflects attention from customer needs and wants. This is what makes businesses in a mixed economy take on the “rules are rules” mentality.
So why the bureaucratic indifference to people? Paperwork is the only yardstick bureaucracy has to measure its “success.” Laws and rules are commands that compel citizens to obey, and citizens usually do obey to avoid punishment. Paperwork records the compliance—but it must be correct.
The objective yardstick of a business is its bottom line, profits, which means it is successfully meeting its customer’s needs and wants.
A bureaucratic society is a rule-bound society. Freedom and creativity are not valued. (Creativity, after all, means breaking rules.) The more bureaucratic the society, the more rule-bound it will become. The socialist state, therefore, is a society dominated almost entirely by laws and rules. The more laws and rules, the more total the regulation of human affairs, the less value it places on its citizens’ lives.
Total bureaucracy—the totalitarian socialist state—is dictatorship by excessive law. This describes Nazi Germany during World War II, as well as the USSR and many similar regimes in the twentieth century.
The list has to be correct because all paperwork has to be correct. William Shirer made this clear in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when he described gangs of German secretaries dutifully typing orders to send Jewish people to their deaths.
Even a few members of Kerensky’s provisional Russian government, who were discovered by illiterate Bolshevik revolutionaries during the 1917 October Revolution, were compelled to write their own arrest papers. The paperwork had to be correct!
In a bureaucratic society, thought is neither required nor appreciated, only compliance. Thus, paperwork has to be correct for the lower-ranked official to avoid punishment and for the higher to justify his or her actions, by reference to a law or rule.
Concern for the person behind a bureaucratic number is minimal or non-existent. Just ask students at state-run universities what it is like to be a number on a roster. (And the rosters do have to be correct!)
Message for advocates of a free society? The fewer laws and rules, the better. Indeed, a strong argument has been made that we could easily do without legislature-made, statutory law by replacing it with common law.
Central planning requires centralized law-making, that is, deliberative assemblies (legislatures) and regulatory agencies to write and pass thousands of pages of laws and rules, all of which are subject to ossification, officious manipulation, and arbitrary application. This gives us the nefarious rule by men under a pretext of rule by law.***
Common law is decentralized and requires conceptual thinking by each citizen and judge to resolve specific disputes with reference to principles. Justice evolves and improves on a case by case basis, as wealth and well-being do in the decentralized free market.
Conceptual thinking requires the discovery and understanding of universal principles that can be applied to many concrete instances. Common law, therefore, is general and guided by rights, such as the requirement to prove intent in criminal cases, but it is constrained by precedent and usually confined to specific parties. Change in common law occurs slowly and deliberately.
Legislature-made laws and rules, in contrast, aside from their flagrant violations of individual rights, are at the same time concrete and sweeping, such as a ban on smoking in all public places and within twenty feet of a building. And because legislature-made law is made, not discovered, change occurs quickly and frequently, thus leading to a continual increase of laws and rules—and paperwork.
Thinking in principles and independent judgment are prerequisites for building and sustaining a free society. When our minds are driven to focus on lists and paperwork that must be accurate, conceptual thinking becomes difficult, though not impossible. For many, however, in bureaucratic situations, morality—honesty, integrity, courage, dignity . . . and human decency—go out the window.
The list has to be correct.
For more on the relationship between bureaucracy, socialism, and dictatorship, see Mises’ 1944 book Bureaucracy. Here is his one-paragraph summary and conclusion (p. 125):
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau, what an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!Bureaucracy is not a benign institution.
* Man’s Search for Meaning (pp. 52-53). In this work, Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, describes his experiences in the concentration camps and his struggles to survive.
** “Peaceful” is in scare quotes because any expansion of laws and rules beyond retaliatory force to protect individual rights, through administration of the police, military, and legal system, is a violation of rights and therefore becomes a declaration of war on citizens. The overt use of guns is not usually required in many bureaucratic systems, because of citizen compliance, but the guns nonetheless are there in the background.
*** “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime,” said Stalin’s chief of secret police. See this post (pp. 280-83) where I discuss similarities between criminal and bureaucratic personalities.
