The modern bureaucratic government is like Philip II of Spain, the Spider King.

He sat at the center of his labyrinth at the Escorial, endlessly toiling, never resting, as he painstaking scratched comments, queries and instructions on the teeming piles of documents his officials brought in from his globe-girdling domains. The king was overworked, the realm badly governed. The system wasn’t adequate to the circumstances; the kingdom had outgrown the government; the volume of business to be done, the complexity of questions to be addressed and the speed at which decisions needed to be taken quite overwhelmed the capacity of the world’s most industrious monarch until it was hard to say who was worse off — the king or the kingdom.

The American Interest.
Beyond Blue: Even the Dems Can't Hack It Anymore
Essay # 8 

Despite occasional feeble and halfhearted efforts to “reinvent government”, the structure and culture of the Executive Branch and its administrative offshoots today lags far behind contemporary best practice. Whether it is managing information or making decisions, the government structure today is simply not up to its task. 

Republicans and anti-blue statists will want to fix this because bad government is big government and takes a terrible toll on the economy (cumbersome procedures, bad decisions, a large and expensive staff). But smart proponents of a strong federal government will also want to change this status quo because the state as presently constituted is simply not able to take on all the missions they would like to see addressed. 

Just as we once saw competing Republican and Democratic versions of Progressive politics, so going forward we will see competing Republican and Democratic versions of post-blue politics. I can’t predict how these partisan battles will come out, but it seems likely that through it all, the government will be remade and the bureaucratic administrative state that has dominated American life since the New Deal will transform.

I have nothing to add to this except to say how impressed I am with this series of essays. The first essay describes the original American dream of building one's own family farm and how jolting the drastic change was to simple home ownership, why all that happened and how it was survived. You can read the rest of this essay at the link, plus two more for free, but the remaining five essays will cost you $3.00. I say, it's well worth it.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/01/29/beyond-blue-part-one-the-crisis-of-the-american-dream/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/01/beyond-blue-part-two-recasting-the-dream/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/05/beyond-blue-part-three-the-power-of-infostructure/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/08/beyond-blue-part-four-better-living-in-the-21st-century/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/20/beyond-blue-5-jobs-jobs-jobs/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/28/beyond-blue-6-the-great-divorce/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/03/10/beyond-blue-7-from-levittown-to-superburb/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/03/20/beyond-blue-8-even-the-dems-cant-hack-it-anymore/