Overlawyered [updated]

 

Lawyers are a proxy for regulation. To get a feel for how destructive regulation is, you could maybe look at the number of lawmakers. Compared with the combined average of Denmark, Singapore, Norway, Ireland and Finland, New Zealand has 50% more Ministers, 156% more departments, and 280% more portfolios.* 

Or you could simply measure the exploding number of pages of regulations and statute law over the years and guess at how that strangles enterprise. But that would barely do full justice to its stultifying effect either. 

But just measuring lawmakers or the number of pages of legislation they produce doesn't fully measure the destructiveness of what's on those pages. A far better proxy measure is to look at the number of parasites who live off the law -- i..e, the lawyers who write, enact and feed off it. Way back in 1924 H.L. Mencken observed:

“All the extravagance and incompetence of ... Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.”

He was right then. He's even more right now.

We don't have the rule of law any more, but rule by lawyers. When Mencken wrote that in 1924, New Zealand had roughly one lawyer per 1,000 people. We now have nearly three times that number — and we're less free, less safe, and our taxes have increased at least tenfold.

The number of lawyers in the country is a proxy for our level of (over)regulation, of the extent to which we're being strangled by the grey ones. And look at how the blood suckers have grown, especially post-WWII. And they keep growing, with around 3% more of the bastards every year.

It's frightening.

Source: Law Society ‘Snapshot of the Profession 2020’

* 'Too complex,' Max Salmon

UPDATE: "The 54th Parliament ... has proportionately more lawyers (17), managers (44) and analysts (22) than are found in ordinary life. Almost 14% of MPs have legal work experience, compared to 0.5% of the public. The construction sector is the least represented in Parliament...." [SOURCE: 'A Parliament of office workers']

"...every election is a sort of advanced auction of stolen goods.”

“The state — or, to make matters more concrete, the government — consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting ‘A’ to satisfy ‘B’. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction of stolen goods.”

~ H.L. Mencken, from his 1936 essay 'Sham Battle,' collected in his 1956 Carnival of Buncombe

Quote of the Day: Mencken nails it a century ago

 

[Hat tip Nathan Smith]

Mencken on drinking

Those of you familiar with H.L Mencken might be surprised to know he counselled drinking in moderation. Well, sort of.

Quotes of the Day: On Politics…

After I posted a bunch of quotes on bureaucracy last week, I was sent a few more on politics…

It is the responsibility of every citizen to ignore dumb laws.
       — Ian Clarke – aka Sanity [http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=73217&cid=6588343]

Politics on the internet, it’s like Jupiter's great red spot, except made of faeces.
        — cutsDwnSudoIntelects [http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/8llur]

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
        — Milton Friedman

Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
        — Jerzy Peterkiewicz

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
        — Thomas Sowell

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
        — George Orwell

Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have…  The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.
        — Thomas Jefferson

As Isaac Asimov put it (wording approximate): “If I must be ruled by larcenous bullies, I much prefer that they be located far away. Local bullies know far more about me and my doings than faraway bullies sitting in offices in Washington, and can oppress me far more effectively.”
        — Henry Spencer [http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Htt7u5.E6n%40spsystems.net]

Socialism doesn’t start with concentration camps …. Full employment is a threat, not a promise.
        — Maht

I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tentacles and get bad results elsewhere.
        — Milton Friedman

The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.
        — Milton Friedman

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
        — Milton Friedman

I’m a bureaucrat, everything has to be negated at first.
        — Christoph Lohmann

Bureaucracy is stronger than physics.
        — Christoph Lohmann

Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality – an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.
        — F.A. Hayek

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rates higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for.
        — F.A. Hayek

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
        — John Adams, Journal 1772

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.
        — James Madison, speech at the Constitutional Convention, July 11, 1787.

All governments lie.
        — journalist I.F. Stone, addressing journalism students on the one truth they’d be well-advised always to recall.

Freedom includes the right to say what others may object to and resent… The essence of citizenship is to be tolerant of strong and provocative words.
        — John Diefenbaker

Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice… moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.
        — Karl Hess, as Barry Goldwater’s head speechwriter

Liberty is the breath of progress.
        — Robert Ingersoll

The United States is a nation of laws, poorly written and randomly enforced.
        — Frank Zappa

Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.
        — Publius Cornelius Tacitus

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
        — Cornelius Tacitus, 55-117 AD, Roman historian

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.
        — Alexander Hamilton

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.
        — Lao Tsu

There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven’t even included the harm to young people. It’s absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.
        — Milton Friedman

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
        — Alexis De Tocqueville

The behaviour of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
        — Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
        — HL Mencken

Every society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
        — Mignon McLaughlin

The art of taking money from the few and votes from the many under the pretext of protecting the one from the other.
        — Sen. Matthew Quay (R-PA), quoted in Realigning America: Mckinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 by R. Hal Williams.

[The] free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
        — Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri [1998], Commissioner Pravin Lal

A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul.
        — George Bernard Shaw

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
        — P.J. O'Rourke

I would rather live in a society which treated children as adults than one which treated adults as children.
        — Lizard

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
        — H.L. Mencken

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
        — Plato

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which [the American] founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
        — Charles Austin Beard, historian

They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. And then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.
        — Rev. Martin Niemoeller, a Protestant minister in Nazi Germany, in 1945

When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don’t deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment, I kept quiet because I know I’m innocent.
When they took the second amendment, I said nothing because I don’t own a gun.
Now they’ve come for the first amendment, and I can’t say anything at all.
        — Tim Freeman tsf@cs.cmu.edu

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
        — Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

Virtually all reasonable laws are obeyed, not because they are the law, but because reasonable people would do that anyway. If you obey a law simply because it is the law, that’s a pretty likely sign that it shouldn’t be a law.
        — unkown

The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it’s a whole lot better than what we have now.
        — unkown

It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
        — unkown

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.
        — Fredric Bastiat, early French economist

I guess you will have to go to jail. If that is the result of not understanding the Income Tax Law, I will meet you there. We shall have a merry, merry time, for all our friends will be there. It will be an intellectual centre, for no one understands the Income Tax Law except persons who have not sufficient intelligence to understand the questions that arise under it.
        — Senator Elihu Root of NY, 1913

[The makers of the Constitution] conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
        — Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial … the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
        — Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river.
        — Nikita Khrushchev

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.”
        — Albert Einstein, “My First Impression of the U.S.A.”, 1921

I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS.
        — Malcolm Forbes, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism

Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don’t do the same for Time magazine?
        — Mark Fowler, FCC Chairman

Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.
        — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark – Mapp vs. Ohio

The State must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
        — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

No man has ever ruled other men for their own good.
        — George D. Herron

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity.
        — Thomas Jefferson

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliance with none.
        — Thomas Jefferson

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
        — Thomas Jefferson

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
        — Thomas Jefferson

The care of every man’s soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well, what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate, which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills.
        — Thomas Jefferson

History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.
        — Thomas Jefferson

It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
        — Thomas Jefferson

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
        — Thomas Jefferson

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
        — Abraham Lincoln

Prohibition… goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes… A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
        — Abraham Lincoln

There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation.
        — James Madison

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of any of their number is self-protection.
        — John Stuart Mill, 1859

Taxation of earnings from labour is on a par with forced labour. Seizing the results of someone’s labour is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.
        — Robert Nozick, Harvard philosopher

Alcohol didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.
        — unkown

Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was.
        — US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
        — William Pitt, 18 Nov 1783

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
        -— Isaac Asimov

Plea bargaining – where the innocent are more guilty, and the guilty more innocent! The upswing is it does an awesome job padding those all important conviction stats for DAs and politicians!

        — CommentMan [http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/cck7a/c0ro0me]

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
        — Hannah Arendt

Liberal institutions straightway cease being liberal the moment they are soundly established: Once this is attained, no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.
        — Nietzsche

I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics.
        — Ayn Rand

I oppose registration for the draft… because I believe the security of freedom can best be achieved by security through freedom.
        — Ronald Reagan

Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others: The Constitution of this Republic should make a special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.
        — Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence

You can always rely on government to make the right decision, but only after it has exhausted every other conceivable alternative.
        — E. S. Savas, a management professor at Baruch College in New York

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.
        — Joseph Stalin

It’s illegal to say to a voter “Here’s $100, vote for me.” So what do the politicians do? They offer the $100 in the form of Health Care, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Food Stamps, tobacco subsidies, grain payments, NEA payments, and jobs programs.
        — Don Farrar

We propose a five-word constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders. People are the great resource, and so long as we keep our economy free, more people means more growth, the more the merrier. Study after study shows that even the most recent immigrants give more than they take.
        — Wall Street Journal

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
        — George Washington

It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world. The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.
        — George Washington

Where is it written in the Constitution, in what section or clause is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battle in any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it?
        — Daniel Webster

National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S. …. and the cost accounting of the Pentagon.
        — Louis Sullivan/Connie Horner quoted by Novak in Forbes

Most of the presidential candidates' economic packages involve ‘tax breaks,’ which is when the government, amid great fanfare, generously decides not to take quite so much of your income. In other words, these candidates are trying to buy your votes with your own money.
        — Dave Barry

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.
        — John Perry Barlow

Cryptography shifts the balance of power from those with a monopoly on violence to those who comprehend mathematics and security design.
        — Jacob Appelbaum

To err is human, but to really screw things up requires a design committee of bureaucrats.
        — Henry Spencer

They who can give up essential liberty for temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
        — Benjamin Franklin

If you can’t do, teach,
If you can’t teach, administrate,
If you can’t administrate, go into politics,
If you can’t get elected, go to work for the government.
        — unkown

It is sort of interesting that in our society these days we are very quick to apply the term ‘war’ to places where there are no actual wars, and loath to apply the term ‘war’ when we are actually fighting wars.
        — Bruce Schneier

Socialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.
        — F.A. Hayek

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
        — C.S. Lewis, “God in the Dock”

Of course drugs need to be controlled, just as alcohol, tobacco, firearms, prescription drugs, food additives and indeed UN bureaucrats with massive budgets need to be controlled.
        — Matthew Engel [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/486fb0d8-7ca3-11de-a7bf-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340,print=yes.html]

I was struck by the similarities between the anti-drug movement and crack addicts. Both live in fear of ill-defined phantoms. They also tend to have short attention spans, be committed to repeating past mistakes and have a seeming inability to admit responsibility for the problems they create.
        — Tom Feiling

A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.
        — Frank Zappa

Societies without a reservoir of people who don’t follow the rules lack an important mechanism for societal evolution. Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime.
        — Bruce Schneier

The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty.
        — Lord Chief Justice Halisham

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannise will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
        — Voltaire

As a rule of thumb, anything particularly ridiculous in an otherwise reasonable context is probably due to a law.
        — TheWama – http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8kz6z/#c09mc23

I am a citizen, not of Athens, or Greece, but of the world.
        — Socrates (5th Century B.C.)

It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.
        — John Adams

People are pissed off about the seemingly impossible goal of social mobility. Their proposed solution is to take the wheels off the cart.
        — Stanley Lieber

Sisyphus only get the rock-rolling job after the gods showed mercy, he was originally sentenced to an eternity of political debates.
        — unkown

Politicians like to panic, they need activity. It is their substitute for achievement.
        — Sir Humphrey Appleby

[Hat tip Quotes.Cat]

Quotes of the Day: On Bureaucracy

And thus Bureaucracy, the giant power wielded by pygmies, came into the world.
-- Honoré de Balzac, Les Employés [The Government Clerks]

The public is hedged about by so many goddam bookkeepers that no time is left in which to produce. More time is spent in carrying out garbage than in carrying in food.
-- Martin H. Fischer

If we can ever make red tape nutritional, we can feed the world.
-- Robert Schaeberle

Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.
― Laurence Gonzales, Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things

Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.
-- James H. Boren, in When in Doubt, Mumble : A Bureaucrat’s Handbook

Bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits.
-- Dale Dauten

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
-- Eugene McCarthy

The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable.
-- U.S. Privacy Study Commission

Government machinery has been described as a marvellous labour saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.
-- John Maynard Keynes

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.
-- John Stuart Mill

The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians and social workers as ominous and dangerous.
-- W.G. Hill

Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die.
-- Charley Reese

It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.
-- H.L. Mencken

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
-- Mary McCarthy, "The Vita Activa", The New Yorker

There are more agriculture bureaucrats than there are farmers in this country.
-- John Kerry, Washington Times (16 January 2004)

“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's Law of Bureaucracy]”
― Jerry Pournelle

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.
-- - Ludwig Von Mises, Bureaucracy

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”
― Simone Weil

When they come for you, they won’t come with a gun but with a clipboard.
--unattributed

Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.
-- John Stuart Mill, On Representative Government

In all countries with a settled bureaucracy people used to say: The cabinets come and go, but the bureaus remain.
-- - Ludwig Von Mises, Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
-- Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
-- Laurence J. Peter, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time

Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them.
-- P. J. O'Rourke, All the Trouble in the World

Representative democracy cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government pay roll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.
-- - Ludwig Von Mises, Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?
― Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune

Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator.
-- - Ludwig Von Mises, Bureaucracy

The building codes of the democracies embody, of course, only what the previous generation knew, or thought they knew, about building...
-- Frank Lloyd Wright

If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.
-- Hyman Rickover

Confidential matters are not dealt with over the telephone, you'd better come here in person. I cannot leave the house, Do you mean you're ill, Yes, I'm ill, the blind man said after a pause. In that case you ought to call a doctor, a real doctor, quipped the functionary, and, delighted with his own wit, he rang off.
The man's insolence was like a slap in the face. Only after some minutes had passed, had he regained enough composure to tell his wife how rudely he had been treated. Then, as if he had discovered something that he should have known a long time ago, he murmured sadly, This is the stuff we're made of, half indifference and half malice.
― José Saramago, Blindness

Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.
― Kollontai Alexandra, La Oposición Obrera

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.
-- Joseph A. Schumpeter

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state…
--― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.
― Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line

Ultimately, however … a powerful bureaucratic class is in the same relation to commerce as was the scorpion in Aesop to the dog on whose back he crossed the river. They will destroy commerce and establish socialism, even if it kills them, because that is their nature.
-- John Derbyshire

A committee can make a decision that is dumber than any of its members.
-- David B. Coblitz

It is the subordination of every individuals whole life, work, and leisure, to the orders of those in power and office. It is the reduction of man to a cog in an all-embracing machine of compulsion and coercion. It forces the individual to renounce any activity of which the government does not approve. It tolerates no expression of dissent. It is the transformation of society into a strictly disciplined labour-army.
-- - Ludwig Von Mises, Bureaucracy

Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it's not the result of venal bureaucrats.
― Philip K. Howard, Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America

The greatest power of bureaucracies is to make the smart act stupid and the good to act evil.
― Raul Ramos y Sanchez, Pancho Land

In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.
― Chaim Potok, Davita's Harp

Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.
-- unknown

Maturing with H.L. Mencken

Look in any good dictionary of quotes, and after Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde you’re likely to find one H.L. Mencken coming in third for the number of quotes included. Samples: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” – “Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time” – “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Guest poster Bill Bonner argues there are more reasons to read Mencken than just his undeniable pith.

The writings of Henri Louis Mencken — the Sage of Baltimore — one of the most influential American writers of pithy prose  -- have been a constant companion for me since the start of my writing life. The brilliance, the language, the insight, the derring-do opinionating, the history, the astounding literacy — it’s all here, and it all flows seemingly without limit. All these features are combined in one mind and life, yet none of these features is the reason why it is important to read Mencken. The most important reason is that Mencken assists in the great struggle to free yourself from intellectual conventions and become a mature observer of the world.

To mature means to gradually let go of dependence on others and to depend on your own resources. It also means to accept responsibility for the judgments you make, and not slough them off on other people. It is the same with thinking. To mature means to break loose from canned forms of thought that you once accepted without question, and instead see the world for what it is. It is the essential step toward living a free life.

Modern democracy seems to war against this kind of maturation. Take a look at the best-selling political and financial books on the conventional lists. Their goal is to play to your biases, to bring you the comfort of having something you already think reinforced. In politics, it means cheering for party X over party Y on grounds that you accept ideology X over ideology Y. There simply is no large market for people who accept some of each or reject both.

In finance, it means believing that the world is either progressively coming together or falling apart. The evidence to support this either/or proposition is assembled in order to confirm as true what you would otherwise think.

This is the easy path. But it is not obtaining maturity. It is not thinking for yourself. It is dependence. It consists in shaping your thinking to a model forged by others. People who read only this way imagine that they are educating themselves. Actually, they are only gorging themselves on settled conventions.

If we really want to think hard and maturely, we need to encounter ideas that cause some element of discomfort. We need to leave our comfort zones and imagine that perhaps the mob is not as smart as people say. Maybe we can only find the truth of a situation in an opinion that cuts against the grain, is not represented by political party, and departs radically from settled orthodoxies. When we realize this, we enter on the road to intellectual maturity.

The thinkers and writers who can assist in this process are few. When they do appear, they disappear just as quickly for lack of champions. I fear this might be the fate of H.L. Mencken. For decades, he was there to stir the pot and work against mob opinion. This is why he opposed U.S. entry into World War I. This is why he was a literary progressive in times when most people were stuck in the past. This is why he ridiculed Prohibition when the entire Northeast religious and government establishment thought it was a brilliant idea. This is why he never shrank from flailing orthodoxies that were accepted by nearly everyone.

Throughout his career, as soon as he found a solid bloc of champions, he would lose them just as quickly. He was uncomfortable with popularity, assuming it was a sign that he needed to shake things up a bit. For example, by the late 1920s, he was the darling of the literati and the toast of the town. His attacks on the Hoover administration kept him in good graces, but then he turned his eye toward Franklin Roosevelt and ridiculed the New Deal for the monstrosity that it was. His support peeled away, and he once again found himself alone. He further dissented on the second charge for war in his lifetime and permanently fell out of favour.

Mencken was a champion of the individual, of rationality, of the human mind, in a century of collectivism of every sort. This is why he seriously doubted that individualism could triumph in an era of mass political and religious manias. As his American Credo showed, he understood American culture as few others before or since have. He loved America and its multifarious cultures, but he also saw that there was an intractable problem that would prevent America from ever achieving its hope. That flaw he summed up with the word “puritanism.” He was referring not so much to a narrow religious sect, but to an outlook on life that sought the destruction of sin and imperfection and, in so doing, warred against human volition and freedom itself.

Mencken never sought to bring comfort to his readers. He sought to disturb and dislodge biases, pointing to uncomfortable truths about the world around us. In this sense, he was one of the few truly independent thinkers of the last century. He left a mighty legacy that allows us to study under him — not so much the specifics of what he said, but rather how he thought. Everyone who seeks to live a freer, happier, and more prosperous life can now look to him as an example of what it means to exercise truly independent thinking. To be his student means to be grounded even as those around you are being buffeted about by the winds of public opinion and political manipulation.

It’s all summed up in the revolutionary idea of Mencken’s core credo: “I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.”

Sincerely,
Bill Bonner

Bill Bonner is the founder and president of Agora Publishing, and the principal author of The Daily Reckoning.
He is the co-author of the books Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving The Soft Depression of The 21st Century, Empire of Debt, and Mobs, Messiahs and Markets.
This article first appeared at Laissez Faire Today .

The world needs more mah-jong factories

Time for a joke.

Q: How much do you charge?
LAWYER: $500 for three questions.
Q: Crikey, that’s expensive isn’t it?
LAWYER: Yes it is. What’s your third question.

Famous for defending scum, lawyer Barry Hart has been brought before the Law Society for charging fees at $1000 an hour despite much of the preparation work being done by a junior lawyer who had been practising for only two months.

News lawyers are charging like wounded bulls is hardly news. Law is a restricted monopoly—made so by lawyers.  They interpret an impenetrable and ever-expanding library of laws—all written by lawyers. Their over-charging is reviewed—by other lawyers.

The only news here is his colleagues crying crocodile tears over his over-charging, all the while wishing they could charge like he does.

Mencken was right: with very few very noble exceptions lawyers are mostly scum themselves. They play both sides of the street while taking money to lie for a living—and that’s the good ones. The bad ones head straight to parliament. As Mencken once observed:

All the extravagance and incompetence of our present government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah-jong factory, we'd be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost half.

The world needs more mah-jong factories. Urgently.