My “everything you need to know” columns have a common theme of highlighting stark examples to make broader points.
- China’s economic policies are misguided
- The USA is out-performing Europe
- People respond to tax incentives
- California has remarkably bad governance
- Teacher unions deserve scorn and abuse
Today, we have a tweet that tells us everything we need to know about government bureaucracy.
Alex Stapp of the Institute for Progress tweeted about the staggering expansion of middle management in Washington.
The tweet shows five sentences from a story in the Atlantic last month, authored by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini.
And Mr. Stapp highlights two jaw-dropping excerpts, one about the 50 percent increase in middle managers and one about the five-fold expansion of the federal flowchart.
In other words, we now have a top-heavy bureaucracy.
Yet is there even the slightest bit of evidence that we have better government or more efficient government?
Of course not. The evidence strongly shows just the opposite. Sort of like this image.
Indeed, the article in the Atlantic was written to point out that Operation Warp Speed (the development of COVID vaccines) was successful precisely because government bureaucracy was kept to a minimum.
Needless to say, no lessons were learned from that experience. We now have even more government, even more bureaucracy, and even more top-heavy middle management.
Why? Because government almost always operates for the benefit of insiders, not to serve people.
P.S. Reminds me of the everything-you-need-to-know column I wrote about how more NHS bureaucrats in the United Kingdom is correlated with longer waiting lists for patients.
