Ezra comments about the hassles of the DMV and hits upon one of my pet peeves of American Life: bureaucracy overload.
Every facet of citizenship in the US demands it’s own bureaucracy – sometimes even two or more. To drive a car in California, one must maintain three bureaucratic loops, at least – two at the DMV, licencing and car registration, plus an insurance bureaucracy. In order to remain an upstanding citizen on the federal level, there are at least three – the SSA, the IRS, and the State Dept (optional, for passport) plus a seemingly infinite number more if you require social assistance of any kind.
Then there’s health care, bank accounts and various goods and services that we all volenteer to become a part of.
Not that I have a solution, or even much of a point here except venting – but has anyone ever done study of how much time and productivity is lost to stupid bureacratic hassles? And is there any sensable way to combine any of these, especially at the state and federal leval?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: bureaucracy, DMV
Bureaucracies are a hassle more often than not because the quality of individuals at the point of contact are not always good at the skill of thinking or exercising judgment. But I try to refrain from attacking the notion of bureaucracy because the alternative is unacceptable. We have bureaucracy to remove the fickleness of human interaction, to assure consistency and reliability into the system, to standardize quality of goods and services, to equalize level of service (even if it’s not an especially high level). Efficiency is not among the high priority items in designing a bureaucracy nor should it be. Efficiency will inevitably lead to inequalities in treatment and that is precisely the reason to have a bureaucracy. The key is education and training to assure that people of appropriate quality are working at these jobs. And of course nothing and no one is perfect. Your results may vary.
It’s not so much that I have a thing against bureaucracies per se, but that the onus of maintaining ones status in the various structures is so costly in terms of time and hassle – plus the sheer number required. I was kinda hoping that by now we’d have robots doing our bureaucracy work for us. Computers and the internet have alleviated some of the inconvenience, true, but not enough.
Although the libertarian in me distrusts the idea of a Federal ID card, I’d be more open to it if a single card could, say, store my SS#, DL#, Passport Info, Insurance Info, and all my medical records (encrypted, of course), and any other necessary information needed for civic life. Then if that card could alert me via email when something needs re-upping or more info we’d be along way towards cutting down some of the hassle.
I understand about the ID card and logic suggests that it shouldn’t be such a burden but obviously the inherent suspicious rebel american in all of us tends to recoil from the notion even though between the assorted IDs we already have it’s more or less a done thing anyway, just scattered amongst agencies. good thing they’re as inefficient as they are now or we might have reason for concern, eh?