Strangling, stifling, inefficient bureaucracy

In his column on Thursday, WND editor in chief and CEO Joe Farah explained that government is not our friend.

"Americans need to understand that government is, has been and always will be the gravest threat to freedom we face," he wrote. "Yes, I worry about big corporations getting personal information about me, but not nearly as much as I fear what government might some day do with the voluminous information it requires me to provide,"

Amen to that. No truer words have been written.

But why is government so all-encompassing? Why is its growth such a threat to freedom? Because of a phenomenon called "the bureaucracy."

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Bureaucrats – those "officials" appointed, hired or "named" to run bureaucracies – tend to grow them unnecessarily and exponentially.

According to sociologist C. Northcote Parkinson, the natural tendency of bureaucracy is to grow and keep on growing by at least 6 percent a year. Then, wanting to appear busy or important or both, bureaucrats increase their own workload by writing loads of memos, creating lots of rules and regulations, filling out forms, creating forms that need filling out and maintaining files.

In other words, a huge "make-work" program.

Then a strange thing happens. These bureaucrats suddenly begin to feel overburdened by all of the work they have created. So they feel compelled to hire assistants. At that point, bureaucracy really takes off because now – with growing "workloads" and numbers of assistants to "manage" – bureaucrats push for more power, responsibility and money because their jobs have gotten harder.

This phenomenon then begins to repeat itself over and over again until suddenly the growth is out of control. As a result, Parkinson observed, many bureaucrats end up doing the same work at a great cost to taxpayers.

Ironically, the director of former Vice President Al Gore's project on reducing the federal bureaucracy once said, "As a rule, virtually any task being done by government is being done by 20 or more agencies." Too bad the Clinton-Gore regime vastly expanded bureaucracy in Washington instead of trimming it, per Gore's mandate.

These are what bureaucracies are. This is what it costs taxpayers nearly $2 trillion a year to operate – and that's just on the federal level. For just about every federal bureaucracy there is a state and sometimes local agency that does the same thing.

Why do Americans tolerate this in government when we won't tolerate it in our own lives? Would you pay 20 electric companies every month if you only had to pay one?

Then there is the private sector – how many corporate executives would keep their jobs if they regularly hired 20 people to do the job of one? How many small business owners would remain in business if they hired 20 times the number of employees they needed?

Yet Americans will allow Congress to create – and continue to grow – all of these inefficient bureaucracies and never so much as raise a question about them? Unbelievable.

When Joe Farah says government "is, has been and always will be" our gravest threat, he's right. Bureaucracy is eating away at our ability to thrive; if we fail to thrive, we die.