Bureaucratic Logic and Normal Logic
Hugh Hewitt > Blog
Saturday, November 15, 2025
So, this week, a couple more articles on microplastics. Now, here’s the thing – the articles talk about the harm that these materials might cause, but they also claim little is known about them. Yet, something must be done! Now, in the short term that breaks down into, “I am scaring you so you will give me more money to keep studying this problem.” But that is when the issues really get serious. One, after pouring millions into researching a potential problem, agencies would look foolish if there was no problem, so there is gonna be a problem, whether there is actually a problem or not. Two, the problem will then get completely lost in a haze and maze of regulation that empowers the agency, but does little to actually deal with the problem. Or worse, it may do nothing about the actual problem other than burden the world so that the agency can “track” the problem. That’s bureaucratic logic.
You see, bureaucracies begin with a mission, but the mission is soon subsumed by the agency’s operating mechanism and its need, like any organization, to grow. And once the agency has been around long enough that no one in it was there in the beginning things turn really ugly. New generations come in and they are there just to grind the wheels, exactly as the manual tells them the wheel are supposed to grind – no appeal to actual reason can then prevail.
Most people have experienced at one time or another the phenomena where you present information to an agency and they refuse to accept or review the information unless it is on their form – or in this day and age entered properly into their database via the internet. The information is not the issue, the wheels of the bureaucracy are. And so the mission is lost because the information is what the mission is about. Now its just the rules, their reason for being does not matter.
And then, at some point they try to fix it, with more rules and more bureaucracy. And that is when things get really weird. That link is to a story about how San Francisco has a property tax crisis so hemmed in by regulation that resolution is near impossible. It would be funny if the city wasn’t crashing while they thrash about.
Which brings me to Donald Trump. He is crashing through bureaucratic barriers like the proverbial bull in the proverbial china shop. He is applying normal logic to places that had long ago let go of any tether to such for the sake of bureaucratic logic. In doing so he forces agencies to either return their focus to their mission, or to admit mission accomplished. There is no bureaucracy in the world that will ever admit “mission accomplished,” because then there is no reason for the bureaucracy to exist.
Hence so much of the drama that surrounds us. Just remember that the next time you are tempted to think he is destroying something sacred.
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