Natural Resources and Bureaucratic Predators

In: Policy review: the journal of American citizenship, Band 11, S. 69-81

Abstract

Bureaucrats responsible for natural resource management systematically advocate programs that are financially irrational or environmentally costly, & increase the command sector of the economy at the expense of voluntary exchange, as exemplified in timber production & range land management. The logic underlying this bureaucratic behavior is presented. Since it is bureaucratically profitable to provide programs that yield concentrated benefits to politically important, supportive clientele groups, such programs continue to be advocated even if they are socially costly. However, bureaus grow along with their programs, & budgets for managing socially costly programs are financed out of the treasury, which is a common pool resource funded by the taxpayers. Society as a whole increasingly loses productive resources to socially costly programs, & is forced to bear the cost of more & more decisions in which it has no voice. Advocated is a "predatory" bureau, whose budget is an increasing function of the number of socially costly bureaucratic programs that it can demonstrate to exist. Those who might argue that this device is "just another bureau" should understand that the predatory bureau would harness the bureaucrats' own incentive structure to counter common bureaucratic pathologies. Modified AA.