I remember one time we were asked by our Professor in our doctoral program to choose between freedom and justice. All my colleagues including myself agreed that we rather have justice than freedom. After several years, I realized that justice without freedom is not real justice.
Bureaucracy is an old book for freedom-lovers. It was published in 1944. Of course, there are other numerous old books that can be described this way. The reason why I am reintroducing this book for I suspect that many in our days are not familiar with its message. In this book, the author argues that both our personal and economic freedom have been consistently coerced by the State through the gradual expansion of bureaucratic management.
Just like what I did during the past twenty-six days where I shared three economic articles based on Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, I intend to do the same thing with Bureaucracy. In Economic Policy, I intentionally skipped the three chapters on interventionism, socialism, and foreign investment and I only covered chapters on capitalism, inflation, and policies and ideas.
Here in Bureaucracy, again, I will just choose three chapters among seven. The topics that I prefer to write are about the consequences of bureaucratic management and the way to reduce the size of the civil government.
In this post, I will first re-introduce the book, and hopefully, in the next two articles, I will elaborate more on the consequences of bureaucratic management. And then in the concluding article, a challenge to average citizens of the nations of the world to seriously take the responsibility to personally educate themselves on how the economy works.
In introducing the subject, I want to answer the following questions:
- Are we really living in a post-bureaucratic era?
- Why did Mises write Bureaucracy in the first place?
- What is bureaucracy by the way? In what way is it helpful? And in what way does it become destructive?
The 21st Century as a Post-Bureaucratic Age
Some people think that we are now living in a post-bureaucratic era. An example of this is the TED video uploaded on YouTube twelve years ago, last 18 February 2010.
Perhaps, those who believe that bureaucracy was already outdated in view of the rapid changes that are happening in our time are very positive that such dissolution will soon take place in the near future. However, we cannot deny the reality that bureaucrats are still part of our daily lives. We see their inefficiency, and we are not pleased with the way they serve the public, which they describe as their “bosses” and their “employers.” This is good to hear as rhetoric and to read in papers but the practice tells us otherwise. It appears that, as if, the public fund is their only concern, but of course, they hide it behind altruistic goals.
In our time, we experience on a daily basis that both our personal and economic freedom are under threat. However, most people are not aware of how such a threat is taking place. We don’t see the expanding power of the civil government as related to this threat. If this is the case, how can we recognize that both our personal and economic freedom is being consistently coerced by the State through the gradual expansion of bureaucratic management?
The Goals in Writing the Book
Why did Ludwig von Mises write the book in the first place? Is his description unique only in his time? Is the message of Bureaucracy no longer applicable in the 21st century? Reading Bureaucracy for yourself will help you find out the answers to these questions.
For this unpopular economist, the reason he investigated the growth of bureaucracy in the United States, France, Germany, and Russia is that he thinks that this is the best way to study the conflict between socialism and capitalism. Through this study, one can see whether human society is heading toward "freedom, private initiative, and individual responsibility" (p. iii) or towards a coercive and interventionist state or in other words, towards "individualism and democracy" or "authoritarian totalitarianism" (ibid.).
Reading Chapters 5 and 6, you will realize that additional reasons exist in the mind of the author and one of them is to counter the trend toward the bureaucratization of the mind and shift it towards liberty.
In chapter 6, our economist offers direction to the misguided and activist youth. He desires to stop the crisis of progress and civilization. He hopes for a peaceful society where bureaucratic violence and endless civil war have no place. Finally, he dreams to see the critical sense among the citizens of a democratic society restored.
As a whole, in Bureaucracy Ludwig von Mises aims to provide the basic training of the mind to understand the critical issues of our time. As for him, this is his way to inform the average citizens of democratic nations by providing them a fundamental understanding of how bureaucracy affects personal and economic liberty.
Use and Misuse of Bureaucratic Management
A qualifying statement is appropriate at this point. Note that Ludwig von Mises is not completely against bureaucracy itself. In fact, he distinguished between the legitimate use and the totalitarian abuse of bureaucratic management. He recognized the limited use of bureaucracy for social cooperation for without it, it is impossible for a civil government to function. What this unpopular economist opposed is not the appropriate use of bureaucracy, but its interference in almost all aspects of the citizens' life. He narrated that this kind of bureaucratism is very old and a tool in the hands of a totalitarian state, which is evident once again in modern-day socialism where the goal is to control "the individual in tight rein from the womb to the tomb." (pp. 17-18).
Moreover, though Mises recognized that in this kind of political atmosphere, "the officeholders are no longer the servants of the citizenry but irresponsible and arbitrary masters and tyrants", he did not want to place the blame on bureaucracy itself, but on the kind of political system dominated by an idea that "assigns more and more tasks to the government. " (p. 9).
Chapters two to four of the book are foundational to understanding the character of bureaucracy. In chapter 2, the author describes bureaucratic management in general. Chapter 3, is about the bureaucratic management of publicly owned enterprises. And then in Chapter 4, Mises elaborates on the bureaucratic management of private enterprises.
Summing up all the points Mises raised in these three chapters, we can come up with the following characteristics of bureaucratic management:
- It kills the eagerness of its personnel through strict compliance with regulations
- Its quality of service deteriorates with the passing of time.
- It functions in relation to the rule of law and the budget.
- Its growth unavoidably results in judicial arbitrariness, which threatens the rule of law that bureaucrats claim to follow.
- Public officers utilize public funds for their own ends.
- The discretion of subordinates is limited
- Inability to verify the objectives in monetary terms
- Disconnection between revenue and expenses, and
- The absence of market price, which is to say that the kind of service provided by the government has no market value, and because of this, poor performance is inevitable.
- In the bureaucratic management of publicly owned enterprises, numerous flaws include: the transfer of the financial burden to the taxpayers, the absence of criteria to assess the usefulness of government services, and the wasteful expenditures of public funds.
The foregoing enumeration is just an overview of the kind of outcome of the misuse of bureaucratic management.
I think that’s it for now. I hope the questions at the beginning are fairly answered. For those who are curious to know the details of the author’s arguments, I encourage you to read the book itself.
Grace and peace!
Note:
There are parts of this article that are first published both on blogspot.com and wordpress.com sometime in 2014. The book that I referenced in this article was written by Ludwig von Mises and was published by New Haven: Yale University Press in 1944.
Reading von Mises today it is as if he wrote it yesterday, not mid-20th century. His ideas were correct--they have stood the test of time. If only more people had the brains to read him and the will to resist tyranny. !HBIT !BEER
Then nations will have free, cooperative, peaceful, and prosperous societies.
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I'm not sure if I'll get the time to read this any time soon, but it sure sounds like an interesting perspective on the subject. My father used to say that in the Netherlands, where I was born, they're bureauCrazy hehe. That's the one thing we agreed on. I believe much of what the Netherlands has been and been doing can be called crazy, and unfortunately, many other countries have adopted their ways...
That's a great and new terminology for me. For sure, I will remember that: bureauCrazy. 😄
Yay! 🤗
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Interesting stuff. I found your post on ListNerds. I think there is a shift that is starting to take place back to more local control of the government. We are seeing it in the school system for sure. I am not sure larger system is going to fully allow it and I am also not sure it is necessarily a good thing. There are a lot of really dumb people out there and they really have no business telling us how to run things. Tax payers or not. I dunno, it is going to be tough. I certainly wouldn't be sad to see unfunded mandates go out the window.
This reminds me of what happened in Germany during Hitler's time. We are told that the well-intentioned people who laid down the foundation for the emergence of Nazism were shocked when they see the destructive results done by the central government. That's not what they intended when they gave their support to the government at that time. We learn from history (and from The Lord of the Rings 😆) that officeholders are prone to corruption when they are in power. Based on such a perspective, power is less a threat when it is decentralized. If this is really the case, I would prefer local control to the increasing power of one central government.
You need to sit in on one of our school board meetings and hear just how silly some of these people sound sometime! :) I hear what you are saying though!
Just curious. Are those members of the BOT elected by the parents? 😆
Yeah school boards are elected locally. It is the public comments that are scary though, not so much what the board says!
Wow! For accountability's sake, that seems good to me. 😎
Depends on the group of people I guess.
My book list is already very long, but I'm thinking of adding this to my stack.
That would be a great addition. Thanks for a very positive response. This reminds me of Margit's special dream (Mises' wife):
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I already used my hivebits token early this morning. 😊
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STOPThanks for sharing this information.
My pleasure @rcaine.