I think 20st century big bureaucracy is quite different from the way 18st century governance. The Foreign Office of the United Kingdom managed work with 175 employees at the height of the British Empire in 1914.
In some ways I think one can make that claim but in an important ways, to me, numbers don’t really matter. In both you still see the role of government as an actor, doing things, rather than an institutional form that enables people to do things. I think the US Constitution is a good example of that type of thinking. It defines the powers the government is suppose to have, limiting what actions it can and cannot take.
I’m wondering what scope might exist for removing government (and the bureaucracy that performs the work/actions) from our social and political worlds while still allowing the public goods (non-economic term use here) to still be produced and enjoyed by those needing/wanting such outputs. Ideally that would be achieved without as much forced-carrying (the flip of free-riding) from those uninterested or uninterested at the cost of producing them.
Markets seem to do a reasonable job of finding interior solutions that are not easily gamed or controlled by some agenda setter. Active government I think does that more poorly and by design will have an agenda setter in control of any mediating and coordinating processes for dealing with the competing interest/wants/needs. These efforts then invariable become political an politicized—an as being demonstrated widely in today’s world, as source of a lot of internal (be it global, regional/associative or domestic) strife leading to conflict.
I think 20st century big bureaucracy is quite different from the way 18st century governance. The Foreign Office of the United Kingdom managed work with 175 employees at the height of the British Empire in 1914.
In some ways I think one can make that claim but in an important ways, to me, numbers don’t really matter. In both you still see the role of government as an actor, doing things, rather than an institutional form that enables people to do things. I think the US Constitution is a good example of that type of thinking. It defines the powers the government is suppose to have, limiting what actions it can and cannot take.
I’m wondering what scope might exist for removing government (and the bureaucracy that performs the work/actions) from our social and political worlds while still allowing the public goods (non-economic term use here) to still be produced and enjoyed by those needing/wanting such outputs. Ideally that would be achieved without as much forced-carrying (the flip of free-riding) from those uninterested or uninterested at the cost of producing them.
Markets seem to do a reasonable job of finding interior solutions that are not easily gamed or controlled by some agenda setter. Active government I think does that more poorly and by design will have an agenda setter in control of any mediating and coordinating processes for dealing with the competing interest/wants/needs. These efforts then invariable become political an politicized—an as being demonstrated widely in today’s world, as source of a lot of internal (be it global, regional/associative or domestic) strife leading to conflict.