Life without bureaucracy sounds wonderful. But are states always and only repressive?
At the start of this unusual and interesting book, which is subtitled “On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy”, David Graeber states what he calls the iron law of liberalism: any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.
An American anthropologist who is currently professor of anthropology at LSE, Graeber begins his inquiry with an angry and moving account of the horrendous form-filling he endured when he had to place his aged mother in a nursing home after she had a stroke. Much of the red tape he came up against surrounded the American Medicare system, which he uses to show how a regime of rules can promote a condition of helpless stupidity in those who deliver the services and those who use them. In effect, such a regime defeats the purposes of the institution it is meant to regulate. This is what happens, Graeber believes, when governments insist on market solutions to every social problem: “a nightmare fusion of the worst elements of bureaucracy and the worst elements of capitalism”.
Related: David Graeber: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary’
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