Bureaucracy, especially government behaves like a minor who never grows up. It always needs a guardian, a caretaker, someone to hold its hand at every crossing. It cannot stand alone, because standing alone would mean proving its actual usefulness — and that’s the one thing it can’t risk.
C. Northcote Parkinson described it perfectly with Parkinson’s Law.Work expands to fill the time available. In bureaucracies, tasks don’t just expand, they reproduce like mold.
One signature becomes two. Like cell division. One request takes three forms.
Minor deviations spark countless meetings. Each new layer creates the illusion of necessity. And every illusion keeps someone employed.
And when all else fails, you introduce “compliance” or “quality management”.
Bureaucracy’s final trick: fighting bureaucracy with more bureaucracy. This is how bureaucracy works: it feeds on delay, duplication, and ritual. Efficiency is its mortal enemy. Because if things ran smoothly, half the staff would vanish, half the budgets collapse.
Now imagine the opposite, call it Cato-Style. Cato, Clouseau’s servant, who attacked him at random to keep him sharp. It doesn’t waste time. It asks: “What’s the goal? What’s the problem? How do we fix it?” And then it just acts. No padded gloves, no polite detours. If it works, good. If it fails, you try again tomorrow. It’s not neat, it’s not polite, but it’s alive. It saves time, money, and nerves.
So why don’t we do it like that? Because in a bureaucracy, nobody builds a career on results. Careers are built on predictability. On playing the game. On keeping the machine grinding the same way year after year. Solving problems too fast makes you expendable.
And why care about efficiency, anyway, when there’s always more money in the pipeline? Tax money, budget money, EU or Swiss Federation money, whatever. The system isn’t built to save. It’s built to spend, to perpetuate itself, to keep the same reports coming, the same meetings running, the same theater playing.
That’s how bureaucracy works: not as a tool of service, but as a padded ring where fighters pull their punches. A performance. A circus of self importance.
But not a circus with awe, danger, or skill. No trapeze artists flying, no knife-throwers hitting their mark. Just clowns repeating the same stale jokes, acrobats stumbling on the rope, and trained animals that never perform. A circus where the ticket price keeps rising, but the acts get worse. Endless rehearsals, yet no show ever makes it to the stage.
And the question for you, the taxpayer, is simple: how long do you want to keep this lame circus in town? How long do you want to fund the clowns polishing their shoes and the acrobats tightening ropes they’ll never climb?