Here is an interesting piece about the relationship between government bureaucracy and imperialist expansion. It seems that, throughout history, regardless of culture, when a state reached a certain level of development, it developed a bureaucracy and, once that bureaucracy was created, the bureaucratic state became expansionist.
This raises some very interesting questions, which could make for an interesting research program for someone who studies institutions.
The most obvious question is, why does this happen? It may be that it is because bureaucracies are inherently expansionist. They expand to continue to justify their existence. When extended beyond the bureaucracy per se, we get expansionist policies. Those expansionist policies may be into the economy of the state itself, or it may be into other countries. It may also be due to the fact that when there is a bureaucracy, nobody is in charge, meaning nobody is responsible, meaning many more unethical actions may be undertaken.
Now, considering that government bureaucracies inevitably result in corporate bureaucracies -- mostly to deal with the government's rules -- the next question to ask is: do corporate bureaucracies cause corporations to act the same way? In other words, do corporations with large bureaucracies engage in things like corporate takeovers more often than those with small or no bureaucracies? Might this then be the main contributing factor to the creation of megacorporations -- including those that are infamously "too big to fail"?
Finally, as the U.S. government becomes ever more bureaucratic, does that mean the U.S. will become ever more prone to imperialistic expansion? Might imperialistic expansion be seen as a way to solve our debt problem? Such policies are not unprecidented in history.
3 comments:
There is a possibility that the debt problem will be handled properly but there is no guarantee. It won't and can't be solved overnight. Imperialistic expansion does not directly tackle the economy of the empire but its main concern is more on the area of politics to sustain the government's power.
To tackle the debt problem would require the governments in question to do things that will get them thrown out of office: draconian cuts in social programs and massive layoffs of bureaucrats. Not going to happen. History shows that when governments get themselves in these situations, they become imperialist. Remember Nazi Germany? They became expansionist on the theory that more land = more wealth. Was it just an excuse? Perhaps. But these kinds of crises tend to create all kinds of excuses for bad behavior. "Never waste a crisis."
Of course by far the biggest expansionist and bureaucratic establishment in the USA, and in the world altogether via over 700 foreign bases, is the Pentagon.
Check out the statistics etc via a Google search.
The biggest and most wasteful SELF-PERPETUATING boon-doggle of them all.
Which NOBODY, either Democrat or GOP dares to question. Because to do so would be political/electoral suicide.
And of course the "values" of the Pentagon THUS permeate every aspect of USA culture.
The "culture" of death thus literally rules in the USA.
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