corporate_fare Bureaucracy
Administrative growth, committees, and organizational dysfunction
format_quote Quotes
"Public choice theory has been the avenue through which a romantic and illusory set of notions about the workings of governments and the behavior of persons who govern has been replaced by a set of notions that embody more skepticism about what governments can do and what governors will do, notions that are surely more consistent with the political reality that we may all observe about us."
menu_book The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty
View Full Quote"The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbour and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work."
menu_book The Road to Serfdom
View Full Quote"The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."
menu_book The Road to Serfdom
View Full Quote"This expansion is the unavoidable consequence of the progressive restriction of the individual citizen's freedom, of the inherent trend of present-day economic and social policies toward the substitution of government control for private initiative."
menu_book Bureaucracy
View Full Quote"A bureaucrat differs from a nonbureaucrat precisely because he is working in a field in which it is impossible to appraise the result of a man's effort in terms of money."
menu_book Bureaucracy
View Full Quote"What characterizes our time is the expansion of the sphere of government interference with business and with many other items of the citizenry's affairs."
menu_book Bureaucracy
View Full Quote"A sum of £2,350 is well within everybody's comprehension. Everyone can visualize a bicycle shed. Discussion goes on, therefore, for forty-five minutes, with the possible result of saving some £300."
menu_book Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress
View Full Quote"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."
menu_book Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress
View Full Quoteauto_stories Books
Bureaucracy
Mises contrasts profit management, guided by market prices and the discipline of loss, with bureaucratic management, guided by rules and discretion...
Read MoreThe Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty
Volume 1 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, gathering his key essays, including "Politics without Romance," his 1979 lecture explaining P...
Read MoreParkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress
Satirical collection of essays on bureaucracy and administration, including the famous law that 'work expands so as to fill the time available for ...
Read MorePolitics as a Vocation
Lecture delivered at Munich University in 1918, published in 1919, in which Weber defines the modern state by its monopoly on the legitimate use of...
Read MoreThe Road to Serfdom
A landmark warning that central economic planning, however well-intentioned, erodes individual liberty and tends toward totalitarian control
Read Moreperson Authors
psychology Concepts
Law of Triviality
The tendency of groups to devote disproportionate time and attention to trivial, easily-grasped matters while giving complex, high-stakes decisions...
Learn MoreThe Fly on the Coach
An idiom drawn from Jean de La Fontaine's 1678 fable