Barack Obama is fond of
telling us he intends to take a scalpel to fixing social problems. Not for him an indiscriminate meat cleaver
that will cut away the healthy flesh along with the diseased tissue. Unlike his critics, he can tell the
difference and therefore, like a good doctor, refuses to do harm.
Then again Barack Obama has
never met a bureaucracy he didn’t like.
Whatever the difficulty, he plans either to throw money at an existing
government agency or to create a new one expressly to supplement the old one.
No wonder our president has
dithered in his approach to resolving the Veteran’s Administration
dilemma. He does not understand that
some bureaucracies can only be repaired by grabbing an axe and cutting them
down to the roots.
Bureaucracies gone wrong are
analogous to cancers. They grow
uncontrollably and metastasize wildly.
Rogue organizations always employ more people than they need—especially
administrators. And they always spew out
toxic regulations that destroy whatever they touch.
This is why sclerotic
bureaucracies must be drastically slashed.
Whether they are governmental, educational, medical, or commercial, tiptoeing
around their edges only allows their occupants to devise defensive strategies. They become experts in obscuring their
malfeasance from outsiders who do not know better.
Among commercial
organizations, market discipline takes care of the more egregious bad
actors. Because they must compete with
other enterprises, they need to be efficient or go out of business. The result is that during economic downturns,
executives fearful of becoming unemployed downsize.
Government workers have no
such fears. Often in cahoots with the
politicians who hire them, they know their financial contributions and votes
will keep their “friends” in line. All
they need to do is rattle their checkbooks and plans to curb abuses are set
aside.
This is why public
bureaucracies must be reformed from the outside. Those who lead and sponsor them are usually motivated
to maintain the status quo. Since both
benefit from organizational gigantism, whatever they tell aggrieved outsiders,
they persist in feeding the beast.
Nor can genuine correctives be modest. Small wounds are readily papered over. Organizational functionaries isolate them so
that they do not weaken the basic structure, or culture, of the enterprise.
Bureaucracies, it must be
understood, are networks of interlocking offices and lengthy ladders of
authority that are linked together by a communal culture. Upset one element and the others are
upset. As a result, those not yet
touched by a change rush into the breach because they know their own positions
will be in jeopardy if they do not.
We have seen this at the
VA. It is also true of the IRS, the
Pentagon, the EPA, the Department of Justice, the State Department, the CIA, Social
Security, Head Start, the Department of Education, and, of course, the
Department of Health and Human Services.
Rest assured, it will also be true of Obamacare.
Many commentators have
observed that the VA’s problems are not new.
They also realize that stopgap fixes have not worked. They therefore recommend that the agency be
replaced by another program—such as vouchers.
This is a good first
step. But it is only a first step. The federal government has become absurdly
bloated. Just as Ronald Reagan advised,
but was unable to accomplish, it must be reduced in size. –Not eliminated, but reorganized and
streamlined.
Standing in the way,
however, is the Bureaucratic (aka Democratic) Party. Despite protests to the contrary, the liberal
ideal is socialism. The objective is for
the government to own—or control—virtually all of the economy. This is regarded as essential for social
justice.
Yet real justice is grounded
in freedom and freedom cannot flourish when trampled on by government
bureaucracies. So let’s get out the meat
cleavers because government officials will not take the appropriate action on
their own unless forced to do so.
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
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