Editorial #97 Bureaucracy and Incompetence
There is a physics law called entropy that states: everything in the universal is constantly moving towards a more random and chaotic state. This is the reason that stopping things from changing is impossible.
There are constant efforts to violate this physical law. The examples are climate change, population control, anti-trust laws, environmental movements, internet privacy, gun control, abortion, social welfare programs, public education and most government bureaucracies.
These efforts may not be obvious at first glance but, in the limit, all these issues have the common element of trying stop any change that occurs naturally. This is not a liberal or conservative issue. It is a human condition. The only constant in life is change and the physical law of entropy guarantees it.
The only thing that we can do is slow change down. It cannot be stopped. That means we must all work to keep things from becoming disorganized. The irony is technology is the reason things are changing so fast. Today the total amount of information in the world today is doubling every three weeks and by 2025 it will double every 3 days. Our challenge is to use this avalanche of information to control change and keep things organized.
This is like an arms race. These new revelations try to make things easier, simpler, faster or more efficient. When changes happen we must adjust. This causes some businesses to lose money when people figured out ways to by-pass their services. Ice and milk delivery businesses or buggy whip makers are the ancient examples. Post offices, land lines, video rental stores, in-store shopping and how we do our taxes are more recent examples.
The point is the more we try to keep things constant the more things change. This is the reason government bureaucracies are so annoying. These agencies try to keep things in a steady state while the world is constantly reacting to the changes that occur. These bureaucracies work against our efforts to deal with change by putting in more regulations.
This explains the frustration of government. It was designed by the founders to work in a very slow and deliberate fashion. This is actually a blessing in disguise. Thank God government works so slowly or they would really screw up the world. So the incompetence we see in government is really the slow reaction time to changes and their efforts to keep these bureaucracies that never die, in place.
This is Keith Kube wishing you the best in making the world a better place.
