And this is where we are going...

Belmont Club:

"At the core of Dalrymple’s critique is the idea that in many modern bureaucracies, appearances have become the actual measure of performance. They exist to fulfill their own procedures. And things may now have reached the point where people have actually forgotten what the point of the job is. And yet this startlingly ineffective, Potemkin bureaucracy has become the preferred vehicle for replacing personal responsibility in much of the developed world. In another article in the City Journal, Dalrymple described why the bureaucracy was expected to stand in lieu of the family: because that ancient institution was rapidly collapsing. The substitution of government for the perceived failure of the Old Ways has been a common theme in the culture wars. And in Britain at least, there was no doubt that the Old Way of doing things was having it rough."