>There's a weird standard established in this post This post is just restating Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, but in way too many words and with a

>There's a weird standard established in this post This post is just restating Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, but in way too many words and with a bit more of a polemic bent that makes it slightly less accurate than it could have been. The trick is separating "people there to drive an organization's goals forward" (or 'innovator') and "people there to advance the power of the organization" (or 'bureaucrat'). You need to protect the first group of people from the second group of people- the more protected they are, the more productive your nation... to a point. There have been many attempts at this- this is the key insight behind Marxist thought, after all (the fact that it ends in complete ideological capture 100% of the time is positive proof that the optimal amount of "parasitic load" on a society is not zero, and that you actually need competent leaders else you get taken over by unremovable, unaccountable grifters). Recent examples of this class's parasitic excess and non-accountability are left as an exercise for the reader. Of course, the post is also wrong in another way: these parasites actually do have a weakness. They get fed to a conquering society by the productive if they perceive the parasitic load the enemy would impose on them is less than the one imposed by the domestic parasites. The fact that societies capable of conquering any Western nation are in short supply doesn't change the fact that, historically (and even still today, in some parts of the world) this is how it has always been.