It's to the benefit of the parasite to make it easier to feed on its host. It is also to the benefit of the parasite to ensure that its host cannot get rid of it.
Bureaucracy will always seek its own survival, even at the cost of its chartered mission.
There’s a difference between sprawling bureaucracy and necessary bureaucracy. Are you really suggesting that all bureaucracy is inherently bad and defaults to wasteful sprawl?
On top of that, the implicit assumptions about how to identify a bureaucrat, and the historical claims about what they've accomplish, get a wee bit expansive at the end:
> There are widespread popular revolts against the evil bureaucratic pyramids: Milei, yellow vests, the recent Dutch elections, the Trucker revolt in Canada, the Bukele revolution in El Salvador; even Elon buying X and firing 75% of the head count. This will continue to spread as long as the bureaucrat remains unaccountable. Bureaucratic reform is the defining problem of our time. Bureaucrats and their NPC enablers have ruined much of what made Western Civilization worthwhile. They’ve corrupted the scientific process, technological development, subverted governments, ruined health, created conditions of anarcho-tyranny in the cities and have generally wrecked most of what they’ve touched. Their proliferation is slowly strangling everything, just as a proliferation of intestinal parasites will weaken and ultimately kill if unchecked. Parasites have no natural predators. You need some kind of medicine to get rid of them. We can study the work of successful bureaucratic reformers; Lee Kuan Yew, St. Peter Damian, Napoleon, Park Chung Hee, Deng Xiaoping, Putin, Marius, St. Ignatius of Loyola: also the unsuccessful would-be reformers such as Nixon. The most important first step, though, is recognizing the bureaucrat.
That being said, it's probably because I don't know what an NPC means in this context. Maybe it's because I'm one myself.
Yes, the article is correct - self-perpetuating bureaucracy is constant in human-civilization. What distinguishes capitalism from other forms of civilization is the ability to substitute creative destruction for bureaucratic sclerosis and collapse - some of the time, if you're lucky...
Creating government bureaucracy should definitely be avoided. We're stuck with inherently-complex problem domains of global climate and large-scale information manipulation, though.
Bureaucracy is just rules. most rules are there to prevent the harm to other members of society. Unless you own all the land and build all the roads you are NOT allowed to do whatever you want if the society that provides the land and roads doesn't want you to.
Also worth noting is just how much power the unelected bureaucracy has in a democracy. It's yet another reason to keep the scope of Government strongly constrained.
You're right - I was responding to an imagined position in an unrelated / irrelevant political context, whereas a more careful reading makes it clear what we're discussing here is the moderating effects of bureaucracy.
My apologies for adding noise instead of considering contributions more carefully!
I don't really understand the author's (and some of the commenters') assumption that making a bureaucracy unpleasant and inefficient is a deliberate decision.
Certainly, once a bureaucracy got to that point, it might have certain benefits, but I don't see how that implies there was a conscious strategy before.
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