No reform can remove the bureaucratic features of the government. It is useless to blame them for slackness. It is vain to lament over the fact that the assiduity of the average bureau clerk is below that of the average worker in private business.

Yet the whole matter takes on a quite different meaning in view of the fanatical endeavors to transform the entire apparatus of production and distribution into a mammoth bureau. Lenin’s ideal of taking the organization of the government’s postal service as the pattern of society’s economic organization and of making every man a cog in a vast bureaucratic machine makes it imperative to unmask the inferiority of bureaucratic methods when compared with those of private business. The aim of such a scrutiny is certainly not to disparage the work of tax collectors, customs officers, and patrolmen or to belittle their achievements. But it is necessary to show in what essential respects a steel plant differs from an embassy and a shoe plant from a marriage license bureau, and why it would be mischievous to reorganize a bakery according to the pattern of the post office. -- Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises (1944) Conclusion - - Mises Institute

Posted by Vanderleun at June 2, 2011 1:39 PM