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Now, of course, this is a boss complaining that the bureaucracy won't allow him to do what he wants to do: The UK competition regulator is stifling innovation and entrepreneurship by taking too long to make decisions, according to a senior Adobe executive who is overseeing its $20 billion takeover of Figma.In an interview with The Times, David Wadhwani, president of Adobe's Digital Media business, said: "The process should not take 15 months to get to this stage. I think we can all agree that expediting these kinds of decisions is important for innovation and for doing the right thing by consumers and customers to make these decisions faster and move more quickly."In November, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was minded to block Adobe's multibillion-dollar takeover of the app interface design business Figma because it could harm competition in product design, image editing and illustration. A final decision will be made by the end of February next year.We're even prepared to accept, for the moment and for this argument only, that the concerns of the CMA are valid. Maybe it will cause problems in some corner of this market. You know, maybe.But now the point we've made before. There are two types of economic growth, there's simply processing more economic resources into more output. Not very green, it's also how all of the Soviet Union's growth turned up. More iron ore and coal to make the steel for the machines to dig up more iron ore and coal. There's also becoming more efficient at our use of economic resources. This is what produced about 80% of the economic growth in the market economies in that long 20th century. Becoming more efficient is also known as increasing productivity. We can talk about total factor productivity (how efficient we become at using everything) or the one that politics currently whines about, labour productivity. How much more value do we gain from an hour of human labour? This productivity increase - it comes from either doing new things, or doing old things in new ways. As above, this has historically been 80% of total growth. The speed of GDP growth is the speed at which we do those new things or things the new way. This is also the same, in concept, as the speed of productivity growth.So, now we've a bureaucracy taking 15 months to even decide whether they might have a concern about someone suggesting a new arrangement for doing something or other. Sure, that new thing might be bad. Might be good too. But at some rate of bureaucratic cogitation the time spent to think through it causes as much damage to economic and productivity growth as simply allowing a bad thing to happen.We're not getting richer precisely and exactly because we've a bureaucracy deciding how we should be getting richer. The answer is obvious - simply abolish the Competition and Markets Authority. Replace it, perhaps, with something efficient, that doesn't, by definition, make us poorer. Or a coin toss, likely to do less harm.Given that example we have of a sensible political reaction to bureaucracy in Argentina, so, where's that chainsaw gone?

Congress is scheduled to consider a major farm bill this year, which will reauthorize many U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs, including farm subsidies and food stamps. The legislation could cost $150 billion a year and so presents an opportunity to find budget savings and reduce the flood of red ink in Washington.

The national security bureaucracy is working itself to death. The syndrome is particularly acute among the leadership of the uniformed military.

"The notion of 'independent' agencies was a holdover conceit of the Progressive era—the FTC was founded in 1914—based on the idea that citizens were faced with large, concentrated forces they had no hope of dealing with, but which could be managed with the seraphic wisdom of benevolent experts." ~ Michael Munger

When it comes to our federal bureaucracy, there are two schools of thought. One says that an insulated group of career bureaucrats have created a deep state that corrupts the performance of government. The other says that our bureaucracy is dysfunctional because there is too much turnover or positions left vacant. Both rest on an underlying feature of our democracy: many of the positions in the federal bureaucracy are appointed by the President and approved by Congress. But, could having less politically selected appointments give us a more functional government?

In this episode, we're doing things a bit different. The Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, headed by our very own William Howell, has developed a series of primers that each focus on the available scholarship about the pros and cons of a particular governmental reform. Each primer is written by a scholar who has also done research in that area. On this episode, we speak with David Lewis from Vanderbilt University who wrote a primer on this question: should we have more politically appointed bureaucrats or less?

A Chicago sandwich shop's survival depends on cutting through red tape.

The regulation of the internet and growing demands for increased identification online threaten to stifle the dynamism of the internet, mirroring the fate of the once-revolutionary postal service.
The post Bureaucracy, Violence, and Utopia: A Fun and Interesting Reminder appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

So, imagine there's a runaway epidemic of overdose deaths that involve non-opioid drugs and that we've had an evidence-based therapy for this unique addiction for the last forty years—but for reasons largely grounded in legislators' and the public's visceral disdain for people who use substances, we have refused to nationally recognize or widely implement this […]

After 40 years of reform experimentation that has seriously weakened the Australian Defence Force, it's time for the government to bring the defence bureaucracy back onto the rails. Australians are becoming increasingly anxious about Australia's ...

Bro-country bureaucracy

Bureaucracy vs. freedom in outer space

A charming story of love, friendship, and impersonal urban bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy usually mires construction projects in delays. Florida is trying to buck that norm.

Reformers should use this opportunity to disrupt and dismantle the DEI bureaucracy itself.

Libertarians will read Ditch of Dreams as a story about bureaucracy and environmentalism run amok.