“We are all well aware,” George Roche writes in America by the Throat: The Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy (Devin-Adair, 143 Sound Beach Ave., Old Greenwich, Conn. 06870; $14.95), “that the Federal Government has grown immense in recent times. It is not as well understood, unfortunately, that as government grows, it necessarily becomes more and more bureaucratic and rigid—and authoritarian. The overweening bureaucracy that emerges is less an evil in itself than a reflection of this trend and a greater evil: the thrust toward an all-powerful central government.” Entirely correct, of course, and yet not the whole story, to which this book never penetrates.
Roche believes that bureaucracy originated with nomadic, pillaging societies, and that it gave rise to the state rather than the other way around. Bureaucracy, he notes, is and has been common to all societies in every period in history, and to every kind of governmental and political system: “It is a simple, identifiable method of organizing human effort, and its form appears to have changed only in minor detail over thousands of years.” Roche identifies as its three chief characteristics its reliance upon coercion as the sole means of enforcing its will, its responsibility to higher governmental authority (whereby it lacks significant discretion in pursuing its tasks), and its purely political nature. (“It functions wholly outside the economic marketplace. No relationship exists between services and its income, so its performance cannot be objectively judged in dollar terms. It is, in other words, completely removed from . . . economic or other private activity. It has no tools to manage economic activity.”)
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