UK Offers Glimpse Of Our Looming Bureaucratic Nightmare

Peer into the crystal ball

It is not at all surprising to see that no fewer than ten organisations representing medical professionals have ganged up to oppose the government’s proposed NHS reforms. They would have us believe that they are acting from principle but truly they are only self-interested. Every proposal for reform of the NHS is opposed by these heavily unionised medical professionals whose only desire for the service is that it should receive ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer funding. They care not a fig that so much of this money is merely wasted on a preposterously inefficient and underperforming organisation.

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Whenever I deal with people on the left, they invariably ask if I believe that the government “should” be “providing” education, health care, etc. It is best to approach these discussions by asking whether the government “can” do any of these things. Once the debate is framed as an examination of the inherent inefficiency of a bureaucracy, the point is easier to make.

A bureaucracy exists solely to grow and protect itself, which always ends up being the problem.

Our government and the national institutions for which it is responsible have become over decades so massively bureaucratised that they no longer exist to serve those for whom they were set up in the first place, but the interests of the hundreds of thousands of people who work in them.

Failures of the bloated bureaucratic nightmare that is the federal government are plentiful and almost impossible to refute. The failures speak more to the nature of bureaucracy than to how a particular version of it is being implemented. So the examples from our friends in the United Kingdom don’t sound any different from what we’re experiencing here.

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You’ve heard of compound interest. Now we have compound bureaucracy, for every bureaucracy is self-perpetuating, self-enhancing. Take one small example from today’s news where we learn that the Labour Party is to set up yet another “independent body to evaluate the most effective forms of teaching and learning”. Another useless, jargonising, paper-producing quango to add to the rubbish heap of quangos already a mile high.

They just get to use the word “quango” over there.

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