Government growth stems from concrete group demands, not bureaucratic pathology

Evidence

For complex reasons, the level of demands on government, and particularly national government, has risen steadily. In accounts of legal history (and other kinds of history), it is tempting to slide into the use of impersonal phrases and the dreaded passive voice. It is easy to write that government got bigger, that federal power was extended over more and more areas, as if one was talking about a natural process, like a chemical reaction, or some sort of progress that was biologically programmed, like the way an egg turns into a chicken or a bud turns into a rose. Politicians love to talk, too, about bloated government, as if the administration were some sort of fat man with an uncontrollable appetite, something that grew all by itself. There is a grain of truth in all of this, but only a grain. Parkinson’s law and the greed of bureaucrats do explain some of the process of growth. People who run organizations (and not just governments) are often ambitious and grasping; they want their agency, company, hospital, university, or whatever, to get bigger and bigger and bigger. There are empire builders within government. But even timid souls and cautious bureaucrats contribute to the size of government. Cautious civil servants like to protect their flanks with rules, forms, and red tape. Yet the monstrous size of modern government is not a pathology of civil service behavior. All modern governments are big and bureaucratic. They are all built, too, on a foundation of concrete demands, which come from concrete groups, groups that clamor for public, that is, governmental response. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3787

Categorization

• XREF: Public-choice theory and interest-group explanations of regulation; echoes Stigler’s capture theory and earlier chapters’ interest-group politics. — connects to: Many political acts spring from organizational needs, not structure; Shared working conditions, not individual character, generate rigid bureaucratic patterns. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 234

Broader Connections

• Many political acts spring from organizational needs, not structure #corroborates (0.82)
• Shared working conditions, not individual character, generate rigid bureaucratic patterns. #corroborates (0.80) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 234