There are many people who have a negative view of bureaucracy or corporations. In fact both are simply different ways of getting things done. The bureaucracy is things being done by government, and corporations is things being done by private business.

Can bureaucracy and corporations go wrong? Of course they can. However that’s not the only thing that can happen. Sometimes both government and business deliver the goods.

A former Peace Corps volunteer once said that Peace Corps were a bureaucracy. Of course they are. They are a government organization. If they had been a private organization, they would have been a corporation. In neither case are they bad.

Are governments necessarily incompetent, corrupt or oppressive? My experience of Australian government has been very good; and American government has improved greatly after its overhaul during the Clinton administration. Nor is business necessarily greedy or conservative. I have known first-rate businessmen who were Democrats or even Greens, and when I worked in the computer industry I saw many good qualities in people with whom I was working.

I suppose the main point of contention is that there is a difference between the way things are conceived and the way things are implemented. Peace Corps started out from idealistic considerations, but it became a government agency that acted like other government agencies. The difference here is between ideal and reality. The two run by different kinds of logic. Unfortunately there is a need to implement whatever ideal of your choice; and the two possible ways to do it – by private sector or public sector – require, respectively, corporation or bureaucracy.

So I consider it immature politics to vilify either business or government. Both are capable of both right and wrong. The mechanisms that are put in place to implement the vision have their place in the system. And while they should be corrected when they are doing things wrong, they are a necessity to accomplish things that are right.