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Bureaucracy is not just hard to spell.

It is hard to manage, hard to work for, and harder to avoid. Large and medium businesses, and government organizations of almost any size are rife with this sometimes necessary evil. So it is worth asking why a free-market capitalist or a libertarian might think government should be diminished if not demolished, but corporations and their ilk should be allowed free reign and expected to work towards the most efficient and common good.

Ideals are fine, even when wrongheaded, but they need to be tempered by reality; they need to be held by people who can work within reason and be open to compromise. This is not just true of economics, but all political and social policy. Compromise is the way politics works over time. Even members of the US House of Representatives have to work with people who don't agree with them every now and then. This is something the Bush administration is just waking up to.

It is this fact, the very actuality of which often keeps our more dedicated right and left wing friends well near the fringe, which fuels the belief among radicals and reactionaries that the two major political parties of the USA are far too similar and might as well be one and the same. So much the worse for those who cannot compromise if they are right. Let the Libertarians, the Communists, the Socialists, and even the Greens marginalize themselves while they pine away for their various ideas of Utopia. The real world still spins, and the rest of us have to deal with it, if only in some very indirect manner.

Anybody who's ever run up against the bureaucracy inherent to both private and public organizations of any size should realize this, given a little tangential thought.
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Comments

  1. Anonymous3/03/2006 6:33 AM

    Sorry to get specific here, this post deserves more, but I think it's important to note that Bush had the luxury of working with a bipartisan legislature in Texas, plus he held a relatively weak office, so his aactions at the time were to simply demagogue and threaten, then accept what was done. That has served him poorly.

    Not to say that this had been his only actions, but I think it does explain a lot about his actions and patterns whith domestic politics.

    --mattH

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown3/03/2006 10:15 PM

    But, but, I thought he united the legislature in Texas.

    ReplyDelete

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