alt Hacker NewsEvery government initiative of this sort either creates a new bureaucracy or bolsters an older one, which brings the Iron Law of Bureaucracy into play: whatever its original goal, every bureaucracy ultimately exists to perpetuate itself.
Every government initiative of this sort either creates a new bureaucracy or bolsters an older one, which brings the Iron Law of Bureaucracy into play: whatever its original goal, every bureaucracy ultimately exists to perpetuate itself.
Also the more qualifications and requirements you add to your social programs, the more bureaucracy is required to process, document, and enforce those qualifications.
For example, if you implement a free lunch program for all public school students in a state, you actually get to subtract out the amount of money that each school district spends dealing with reduced and free lunch program qualifications for a subset of students, all of the paperwork involved in maintaining that list and re-verifying it annually, and the system that manages their account balances at the cafeteria register.