Our National Agent:
Robert Hightower
President
Technology Transfers
P O Box  3916
Chester VA 23831
Contact us:
804-920-4353
БЮРАКРРСЙ    БУСТР
ABOUT US
БUREAUCRACY BUSTER
We're the think tank wing of an ongoing international consultancy
in small business development.

We learned early on that conduct business and commerce freely
in most parts of the world has to be carried out covertly.

We also learned that while Бureaucracies are necessary in
carrying out the mission of any complex purpose, and in the private
sector there is a natural curing element to Бureaucratic excess
(competition), in government they have become an end unto
themselves, resisitant to all natural cures.

Fixing these things is among the things we do in the US and
around the world commercially.

Discussing these things is among the things we do at the Sands
Institute.

The first target is what I call the one fixed star in government’s
sky…in every government, from the best run democracy to the
worst run socialist car wreck. I am speaking of the бureaucracy. It
is the central cog in every government. It is necessary. And it is
composed of people, who, no matter where they came from, the
church they grew up in, no matter how well they tend to their yard,
love their children, make friends with their neighbors, when they
put on the hat of a бureaucrat they become something entirely
different. As Anne Richards once said, “They can’t hep it.” A
бureaucrat’s world is as rigid as an electron’s. On the job they live
by rules as finite as the laws of physics. Together they work entirely
by instinct and appetite, and do things that are beyond their ability
to reason away.

 So the First Law of Бureaucrats is that they will always act
according to their nature…given time. Knowing that, the first
common sense rule you learn is that you can’t get angry. You
shouldn't get mad at a dog for being a dog.
  About бureaucracies, first understand that they are natural to any
enterprise that cannot be managed by one person, any project or
business that requires a division of labor. This is generally seen
as good thing, not bad, for this is how a company can grow from
selling say 1,000 pot-holders to 10,000. Even the receptionist/typist
in the outside office in a 2-man law firm is subject to the laws of
bureaucracy in that, over time, she will add costs to the business
that have nothing to do with the delivery of the law firm’s services.
  Miss Tudbaum isn’t going to break that small law firm’s bank
account, but imagine 1000 of them in a single building.
  Manufacturing companies have standard formulae they use to
determine how much front office administrative costs should be
required against the number and cost of their production and sales
departments. Good businesses operate according to one simple
rule: REMEMBER THIS: All Business is composed of two things,
making a thing well (whether a good or service) and selling a thing
well. All other people are in support of that mission. If the boss
could do without them, he would.
   Why this is important to understand is that a majority of the US
workforce now occupies a job that would be considered
бureaucratic in some way or another. We used to be a nation of
manufacturers and builders, but now we mostly sit in front of a
computer or do paperwork. Our own consultancy here is primarily
бureaucratic. It’s a fact, if someone else signs your paycheck and
you neither make a product nor sell it, you fall into this category.
   So, I hope what I say here won’t offend you, even if you’re in
government service, but all бureaucrats in both the private and
public sectors are driven by the same impulses and instincts.
Some sectors can control them better then others. That's all.
   The main impulse of a бureaucracy is to make itself the center
of the business and to secure it survival and perpetuation. just
like an organ in your body. This may not show up for several
years, but it is always the way the system drifts. This contest
between the owner and his administrative front office begins the
day he hires his first clerk. In government it began the day after the
U S Constitution was ratified….although no one seriously noticed it
(a few did) until FDR in the 1930s. The primary purposes of a
бureaucracy are (in order of importance) to protect its rice bowl,
then grow its rice bowl, and finally, over time, expand the rice
paddy. To these ends it always subordinates the primary mission
of the company to its own.
    Within a бureaucracy certain professions are better suited than
others to do this. I’ve been in too many corporate accounting
offices, and seen too many accountants fast-tracked to the upper
management, not to know that bean counters come first…even
though they make or sell nothing. This has been a troubling trend
for several years, and the current housing crisis is in part a result.
Enron's fall was due to turning the company over to the financial
office.
    But in government lawyers come in first, and a close second in
the private sector. Their rise to power in both the private and public
sectors began with the rise of the regulatory sector in government,
as both sides to have one. (“My lawyer won’t talk to you, he will only
talk to your lawyer.”) Culturally lawyers are more dangerous than
financial managers, and in government they have far more power,
for they see themselves in the vainest of images, as members of
special class, almost Levitical in nature. In fact, there is a large
body of lawyers, private and public, who believe the state is too
complicated to be run by seedy legislators, and can be run more
efficiently by lawyers and judges. Their power is not
inconsequential and much of what drives the government today
you can’t see is driven by this view.
     In private business lawyers are second generation support, i.e.,
they never even come onto the scene until all the dirty work has
been done, and the business is safely being run from a
conference room instead of the shop floor. Still they seek to be the
hub of the business and will use their skills to change in
thousands of imperceptible ways the thrust of the business’
principal activity. This is especially so in government.
    So, is a бureaucracy by nature bad? The problem with
бureaucrats, all of them, is even as they save you hours and hours
of work, in even the smallest company, they require you to spend
additional hours doing nothing more than looking over their
shoulder, and they have all sorts of tricks to make sure you never
know what you’re looking at. This is why I favor small business in
general, and look upon anything with Big in front of it, Big
Business, Big Labor, Big Government as already having one foot
on the proverbial banana peel.
    Still, in the private sector controlling a бureaucracy is easy, at
least on paper, for in the beginning owners pass everything out,
from pay, to responsibility, to trust, to authority, with an eye-dropper.
    But no matter how tightly they control it, the бureaucracy grows a
little out of line with the rest of the company, especially once the
company is passed off to an heir, or sold, or goes public, because
whatever waste was in that бureaucracy stays frozen in place. This
is when a бureaucracy gets itchy to expand, once the founder is
laying on the beach somewhere in the Bahamas.
   The Law of Generations states that no matter how well-led an
enterprise is, no matter how well managed financially, no matter
how well everyone is in tune with the mission of the company,
within fifteen years, give or take, the бureaucracy will revert to
nature by subordinating the mission of the company to its own rice
bowl and its own rice paddy.
    Most businesses last no more than three generations within a
family. There are a variety of scenarios. But in the end the wealth
will have been dissipated, even without the government’s help, the
grandkids or great grandkids one day looking up to find they have
to give up the art lessons and go back to school to study
something that can earn them a living.
    Looking at it this way, the Law of Generations is a good thing, by
the way, at least as long as we have a free economy and
Constitutional protections, for the hill of success is one which
everyone can attempt to climb. Companies that are swamped by
their own internal waste and complacent children will always be
replaced by an even more efficient and vigorous company just
dying to get their business….and the cycle starts all over again.
    But let’s turn to government. It isn’t that way over there, for you
see, while most families will go 3-4 generations up and down the
hill, our government, since the rise of the бureaucratic state in the
1930s, has gone through six generations and is still going up. This
is because they can do what no private business can do. They can
simply come tell you (us) to give them more money. And they don't
have to make or sell a thing in order to do it...although they do send
"their" politicians out to convince you otherwise. (I know, you
thought they were "your" politicians, but that's where I'm going with
this dissertation.)
   This is the principle difference between government and the
private sector. Waste eventually can kill a company and a new
company steps in to replace it. Government has the power not only
to cover up waste, but sanctify it. If you think of waste as a cancer, it
can kill a private company, but it can also be detected, the tumor
surgically removed. But removing the cancer from government is
more difficult because only your elected representatives can do
it…and only you can force them to. Also remember that a
бureaucracy is like a parasite, that once it attaches itself to a host,
it will not let voluntarily…even to save the life of the host. It will let
the host die…and it with him.
    So, is the cancer already there? Here’s a simple example,
which you can multiply by billions of dollars. For every dollar you
send to Washington to help a drunk get on his feet, that drunk only
gets about 25 cents, which as everyone knows, won’t even buy the
smell of a good vintage Ripple. The rest goes to the бureaucrats.
So, how many бureaucrat-middle men do you suppose want that
drunk to get better?

 I could have saved you the long read and simply said that
government бureaucracies in Washington, your state capital, even
your local county and city governments, are grasping for more and
more and more, and they generally get everything they ask for from
the same set of usual suspects, the elected officials.
 I won’t spend a lot of time telling how this has happened, or how
you’re made to think you’re getting more for your buck when you
are getting much less. The government has some genuine relief
programs, but most are “guilt-relief”, such as our drunk. These are
(mostly) for liberals who really could care less if old Joshua beats
his problems with the bottle. What they really want to do is feel
good that he’s being attended to, which to them means that’s he’s
on some бureaucrat’s list of things to do this week. That's all. He a
problem being tended to, for бureaucrats never solve problems,
they only tend to the,. That's a law.
You can see how this sort of thinking serves the purpose of
people will far less compassion.
How бureaucrats throw you off the scent is easy. I told you about
the company owner having to spend so much time looking over the
shoulders of his staff. Бureaucrats don’t like that, so one of the
tricks in the business, accountants and lawyers are especially
adept at it, is to make what they’re doing look so complicated you
don’t know what they’re doing. They just say “Trust me…” and you
either have to trust them…or fire them. Tax laws and regulatory law
in general fits the bill perfectly. How far can  they go? If you haven’t
looked closely, although they won’t get within 1000 miles of one,
lawyers now control battlefield commanders in fox holes. There’s a
psychology there you may want to give some thought to.
The bottom line is that a piece of legislation, a budget of
thousands of pages can be passed by your legislators, without
reading even a single page, all based on not one, but a string of
“trust me’s” from a lowly accountant in the IRS to a staffer on the
budget committee. What a sweet gig if you’re the congressman
who only wants to hang out in night clubs.
Are we just falling asleep at the switch? Of course we never
connect the dots because we thought the guys we hired to
represent us are. No matter, you know here the problem...and the
only (legal way) to fix it. We are the real bosses at the county
building, the state capital and in Washington, and the main reason
the whole shebang is going to hell in a hand basket is because
we’re not looking over the shoulder of the person we hired to
look over the shoulder of the government.
  Now stop to consider the bigger picture, one you may not have
considered before. Look outside the US…Europe, South America,
Asia, even Africa. In all those places the middle class is the
government class and they have absolutely no intention of allowing
a competing middle class to be formed from the private sector.
(Our consultancy is in part dedicated to finding sneaky ways to
circumvent this.) The United States is the only country in the
world…no, correct that…in the history of the world where the
middle class is from the private sector.
Our government sector middle class came much, much later, but
has grown in leaps and bounds since the 1930s. Whether you like
it or not, you are part of a much larger war…yes, a war…in which
our government class is trying to subordinate the private sector to a
position of political and economic impotency, so that, just like the
Banana Republics of yesteryear, and Mexico of today, all remaining
private sector middle class companies will have their rice bowls
only with the permission of the state. This is like it was in Italy in
the 1930s. The small business sector will remain small and will
only get table scraps from the state. This is like it is today in Kenya.
 That’s their plan. This is not conspiracy stuff. This is how it has
always been envisioned ever since the state managers in Europe
finally got rid of the divine right of kings and replaced it with their
vision of a state-managed democracy. It's how the United Nations
sees things. America as a  from-the-bottom-up republic is the sole
hold-out.
  Now you know the stakes and where you fit into the scheme of
things.
  Every election of course, everyone holds their breath as the
people once again march to the polls to prove once again they are
the real owners of the country…only to breathe a sigh of relief the
day after when they find that "...we really ain’t that mad, that the
dozen roses and box of chocolates our legislator brung us back
from Austin or Washington, proved he still loved us and all the
reports of him sleeping around ain’t really so. Just back fence
gossip." Hell, we’re so slap-happy stupid they’ve even convinced
us that they can take 25% of our paycheck every two weeks, hold it
for a whole year, interest free, then send a portion of it back to us,
and we’re ready to send them eFlowers for their thoughtfulness.
 We own these people, or have you forgotten? So, how do you
remind them? How do you (we) gain the same sort of control over
our hired servants that two-man law firm did over their receptionist?