New activities often produce waste. If an activity is new, then you don’t know what result it will produce. If the new activity produces a result that you don’t want, then it was a waste.
Bureaucrats avoid new activities. Thus bureaucrats avoid waste.
Individual initiative often wastes resources. Consider, for example, a person who, on his own initiative, decides to water his garden. He just pours water on the garden. The water isn’t continually re-circulated like a well-crafted bureaucratic memo. The water, which is never edited or revised, is seen only once, and then it vanishes into the ground. The water pours forward without the participants having had any meetings to establish a plan to set up a program to emit specifically authorized units of water. The result, of course, is a waste of water.
Bureaucrats continually circulate and re-circulate documents. Rather than emitting resources, a well-functioning bureaucracy accumulates resources. Resources that are accumulated are not wasted.
In short, bureaucrats conserve their environment. Bureaucrats are the original environmentalists. If a society wants to reduce waste, it needs to develop bureaucracies.
Other bureaucratic insights this month:
sportsBYbrooks alleges, “Sometimes, rules were made to be broken.” That’s incorrect. Bureaucrats avoid waste. Making a rule to be broken is a waste of a rule. We do agree, however, that Layla Kiffin will soon rule the world.
At Not Always Right, a customer service representative who failed to follow standard bureaucratic appointment procedures lost a customer. If you’re not sufficiently bureaucratic, your business will suffer.
The Help Desk at Ubersoft explains well the functioning of marketing departments. Having a large, multi-level marketing department helps it to better fulfill its function.
This just in from Thanh Nien:
Ha Van Phuc, who lives in Con Dau Hamlet in Dak Nong Province, said his two daughters had been going to Nguyen Du Elementary across the Serepok River in Dak Lak’s Buon Don District for years.
But the school has refused to let them return this year to comply with an order from Buon Don District, which says it’s dangerous for children to cross the river by ferry to get to school, Phuc said.
Phuc should follow the bureaucrats. You can count on bureaucrats to protect children.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) has impressive bureaucratic credentials as the oldest and one of the largest news agencies in the world. We are thus deeply distressed to read this lead sentence in an AFP “news” article:
The party that swept Japan’s weekend elections said Tuesday it was ready to do battle with the mighty state bureaucracy to reduce civil servants’ smothering grip on the world’s number two economy.
We believe that bureaucrats, in Japan and elsewhere, make an irreplaceable contribution to economic welfare. Evidently, the bureaucrats working in AFP do not recognize their own worth.
That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.