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This is "power corrupts" at play. People in power almost always try to increase their level of control, essentially centralizing the power structure of the ent

This is "power corrupts" at play. People in power almost always try to increase their level of control, essentially centralizing the power structure of the entity. At some point of time the entity is completely inefficient and collapses under its own weight (rules, bureaucracy). You can see this everywhere where power can be centralized: companies, organizations, nation states. Ironically, successful leaders these days often do the opposite of leading, they decentralize, making the company much more efficient (assuming there are still sub-entities that can/want to be efficient).

zby 10y ago
This might be a part of the story - but it is not the most important one. It makes a good story - a fight between the good and the evil bureaucracy. But what I have seen is rules created in perfectly good faith and often they are reasonable answers to some immediate threats. The problem is with revising them when the situation changes or understanding how they work in the presence of other rules etc. It is quite analogue to how code becomes bloated - this might be an effect of some programmers believing that this is their work security - but more often than that the programmers hate it. Bureaucratic rules are quite literally the code that the administration runs - and we need them, it is just very hard to understand them all.