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Comment by Bloating | Hacker News Reader

The rule of Bureaucracy: grow to absorb all available resources

Ah yes, Parkinson's Law.

  (defun parkinsons-law (k m p n)
    (/ (+ (* 2 (expt k m))
          p)
       n))
 
  Where:
  The retval is the number of new employees to be hired annually
  k is the number of employees who want to be promoted by hiring new employees
  m is the number of working hours per person for the preparation of internal memoranda (micropolitics)
  p is the difference between the age at hiring and the age at retirement
  n is the number of administrative files actually completed

The rule of Capitalism?

The rule of monopoly?

The rule of feudalism?

Greed isn't exclusive to to systems of government.

You're just listing different kinds of bureaucracies. The principal difference with capitalism is that there isn't supposed to be any constraint on everyone trying to do it, and then competition prevents any one entity from absorbing all the resources.

This, of course, doesn't work if the incumbents capture the government and pass regulations that constrain the competition which is supposed to be keeping them in check.

Indeed, so capitalism in its purest, unbridled form has the same flaw: it becomes all consuming. Hence the need for regulation, another form of bureaucracy.

The question is how to constrain that bureaucracy to upholding competition without allowing it to be captured by private interests or, itself, expand to consume excessive resources.

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