5 Feet of Fury

Bureaucracy as Milgram Experiment

(It doesn’t matter which party is in power, if the unelected bureaucracy remains intact…)

Quite apart from the question of unimaginably massive waste of resources — inevitable when people are spending huge quantities of money that is not their own — there is a far more damning moral objection to bureaucratic systems. The establishment of each policy frees every member of the bureaucracy from moral responsibility for his acts.

“Hence you get what I have directly experienced in countless encounters with the tax, family law, drug, hospital, veterans, pension, disability, nursing home, “human rights,” and other bureaucracies, both on my own behalf and on behalf of others, over the last many years. (And never, not even once, demanding financial assistance.) It is the stone-faced functionary — nay, moral zombie — who knows perfectly well what the unjust consequences will be to some innocent person, of following the policy of his department. And then does it anyway.

“On the day of judgement, and in the presence of his accumulated victims, he will be able to say: ‘I was only following orders.'”