Scrolling through the internet  

Whether you use reddit, Feedly, edge, duck-duck-go or any number of other options to peruse the internet you will always find things that peak your attention.  Yesterday I read an article about laws, legislation and bureaucracy (the full article) but I started somewhere else to get there, thanks internet. 

Incompetent Politicians

What caught my eye were the phrases “incompetent politicians”  and “overproduction of low-quality legislation brought about by (possibly brief) periods of political instability”.  They made me think about the pandemic and how we are trying to muddle through.  It made me reflect on government legislation and policy, and how implementation of legislation reveals flaws that must be corrected rather than just justified.  It made me wonder if current government policy creation has been displayed as inept by the application of said policy quickly by the bureaucracy.

Down the Rabbit Hole

The premise of the research and their theory is that “politics and bureaucracy are complements in the supply of public policies: politicians pass laws that determine what should be reformed; bureaucrats implement the laws.”  This bring them to consider if bureaucratic efficiency is hindered when politicians pass to many or too frequent laws.  I would go one step further and suggest that it is not just too frequency or too many, but inept politicians pushing personal agendas to the detriment of the public.

The research notes the the tension between bureaucratic efficiency and and a politicians reform, noting what appears as ‘action’ is actually the speed with which legislation is passed for which the impact is not seen or is never occurs because of existing bureaucratic challenges created by poorly executed political actions.  In this I thought of minority governments or party insurrections that push politicians to look like they are acting when in fact they are just pouring more grease down an already clogged sink from the cheapest, high-fat meat cut they could fry and not actually eat.  The sink did not choose to be clogged.  Is current government trying to clog the sink hoping not to be caught out?

There is a case to be made that we need to go back and revise existing legislation before we pour more grease down the drain.  Is current politically directed pandemic policy an attempt to pour more grease down the drain, hoping that attention will be drawn elsewhere?  Expecting effective legislation to address current challenges must not draw attention from the work that still exists for our future wellbeing and community health.

We need to be open to difficult and time consuming discussion around reforms to social support legislation that remains relatively unchanged since it was first designed in the 1940’s (or earlier).  We need to be ruthless in removing tax legislation that does nothing but add to the complexity of a critical body of legislation that is poorly, if at all, understood by the average person.  All this will take time, and as the public, we must hold our elected officials to competing this task regardless of their term of office or if the party in power has changed.  Equally, we must ensure the plumbers can clean out the drain and not just acquiesce to using less water so that the drain can handle the flow. 

A community wellbeing plan (with accountabilities and sanctions for non-performance) must be of greater importance than a political horizon and the next election.  As the article states, politicians must have their reputational  payoff modified through the coordinated effort of various stakeholders.  There must be a standard of accountability that is set and maintained regardless of the instability in the political or bureaucratic worlds.  We must be in this together.

This material tickled my neurons as I read:

Gresham’s Law of Bureaucracy states that “Bad bureaucracy drives out good politicians” equally, bad bureaucracy drives out good bureaucrats too.

Preambles that contain a long list of references to preexisting laws that are a prerequisite for understanding the new law, make its content less accessible and more ambiguous.

Laws with a greater number of references to other laws fail to be self-contained, making them more difficult to read and understand.