To listen to the hosannas from “liberal” circles whenever some new government appropriation takes billions of dollars out of the pockets of private taxpayers for some new state project employing thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of government functionaries, it might be imagined that a welfare state, run by bureaucrats, was the last word in human happiness and well-being. But the lessons of history point clearly in an opposite direction. The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great, but of a decaying society.
Historians know that both phenomena were especially marked in the declining eras of the Roman Empire in the West and of its successor state, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire. Bureaucrats are an expensive breed, in two ways. They are maintained at public expense and they are uncommonly fertile in thinking up schemes to spend more public funds and multiply their number.
Hyehudi.org
Reviving a Dead Religion Once Known as ‘Judaism’
