#bureaucracy

Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal. ↗

— Donald Rumsfeld

#actually #announced #bureaucracy #congress #effort

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it. ↗

— Joseph A. Schumpeter

#complement #democracy #inevitable #obstacle

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control. ↗

— P.D. James

#murder #death

By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination--is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc. Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it. ↗

— Philip K. Howard

#bureaucrats #human-judgment #law #regulation #responsibility

Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite. ↗

— Philip K. Howard

#government #law #rules #uncertainty #death

When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy which was soon to grow to 67,000 employees. As TSA has grown larger, more impersonal, and administratively top-heavy, I believe it is important that airports across the country consider utilizing the opt-out provision provided by law. ↗

— John Mica

#become #believe #bureaucracy #consider #country

The answer for healthcare is market incentives, not healthcare by a Godzilla-sized government bureaucracy. ↗

— Mitt Romney

#bureaucracy #government #healthcare #incentives #market

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits. ↗

— Mohsin Hamid

#government #state #states #science

The U.N. bureaucracy has grown to elephantine proportions. Now that the Cold War is over, we are asking that elephant to do gymnastics. ↗

— Madeleine Albright

#bureaucracy #cold #cold war #elephant #grown

Well, what did we buy? Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which will put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill. ↗

— Michele Bachmann

#bill #bought #bulbs #bureaucracy #buy