Even the ruling-class media are "shocked" about the EU's failure to get COVD vaccine out to the plebs. Says Breitbart:
The European Union appears to be haemorrhaging goodwill over its botched handling of coronavirus vaccine procurement, as reliably pro-Brussels outlets line up to criticise the leadership of the bloc in the strongest terms.
Or, as they would have said on the Reginald Perrin show, "a bit of a cock-up on the vaccination front."
The point is that when you have any bureaucracy you are going to get cascading incompetence. Because.
Because a bureaucracy is a top-down thing; like a modern army, it is designed to execute the will of the leader, all the way down the chain of command to the young chaps on the front line who will likely lose their lives executing on the power agenda of the chappie up at the top.
The only way a bureaucracy -- or an army -- can correct itself is in the aftermath of a big cock-up or defeat in battle. It's the only time that the leader gets feedback from the front line. Indeed, the whole point of an army or a bureaucracy is to limit feedback. After all, the general of the army can't exactly be too sensitive to the complaints of the squaddies on the front line saying that "hey, general, if we do that we are all going to get killed."
My line is that, apart from the existential response to barbarians on the border, the bureaucratic method is not a very good idea, exactly because it is purpose-designed to be non-responsive.
Compare bureaucracy to the market. The market is responding to new information all the time. Most of the information is true, and acting in response to the information will serve the consumers and increase profits. Some of the information is false, and acting in response to the false information will not serve the consumers.
The point is that nobody knows, in advance, which information is true, and which is false. But it all comes out in the wash.
But a bureaucracy -- or a clerical oligarchy -- is top-down all the way, and so it finds it almost impossible to correct errors until after a disaster. And, as Curtis Yarvin writes, the whole point of being a clerk in a bureaucracy is to avoid making decisions, because any decision might end up as a mistake that goes into your record and prevents any further promotions. As Yarvin says:
The universal principle of bureaucracy is that everyone follows the rules at all times; there is a rule for everything; no one makes or gets to change the rules they follow; and anyone who succeeds understands how to respect the rules, and how to bend them. The career objective of a bureaucrat is to always be relevant, and never be responsible.
But notice this:
So long as the employee has followed the procedure, the concept of accountability is not relevant. If following the rules produces a bad result, the rulebook may need to be updated. The failure does not reflect poorly on either the employee or the rule-writers. They both did their best.
So, obviously the "rulebook" at the EU needs to be updated. But it's not the fault of the chaps in the EU bureaucratic chain of command. Oh no. They were just following the process.
Did you know that after World War I the German General Staff did a top-to-bottom review of the total cock-up on the Eastern and the Western Front? The staffers came to understand that the army of the future could not operate on classical bureaucratic principles. That's because the general could not know the details of the war at the front. Somehow the top-down chain of command had to be more flexible so that people lower down the chain of command had the authority to adapt the orders to local conditions. So the German generals came up with a new doctrine, of which Gen. Hans von Seeckt was the lead author:
[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier.
Hmm: "responsibility." Doesn't sound much like a modern EU bureaucrat. And in World War II, the average German soldier was reckoned to be worth 1.5 to 2 times better than the average allied soldier.
I wonder. Do you think that the EU bureaucracy runs on those principles? Or the CDC bureaucracy in the US? Or the various health department bureaucracies in each state?
Of course not. The health bureaucracies all across the world are organized on the correct procedure and rulebook culture described by Yarvin. And, as the Brits say, such an organization is "not fit for purpose" when the problem at hand is not routine and normal and day-to-day.
That's why I think that our present clerical oligarchy, of "experts agree" and so on, is heading for the trash can. Because what we need is a flexible, responsive politics and culture. Just like the market.
Problem is that in such a system there is a reduced scope for power.
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