The natural question is then: why haven't the people in charge issued some sort of exemption or blanket authorization in this case?
Remember this folks when voting for people who advocate for a greater role of bureaucratic control of our lives.
Because large bureaucracies only ever get modified in the aggregate.
You have a bureaucracy that imposes 500,000 rules. If you want to know which are worth it, you have to evaluate each of the rules individually, because some may be worth it and others not.
Really evaluating 500,000 separate rules would take a large staff multiple lifetimes, so you still have to decide whether the bureaucracy as a whole is doing net good or net harm in order to determine whether it should be suspended for the years it will take to evaluate all the rules.
But by the time you finish the evaluation, years have passed since you started and the facts on the ground may have changed, or new rules proposed, so the evaluations are stale before they're completed and you have to start over.
It leaves you with only the systemic question of whether large bureaucracies are a net positive force as an institution. The answer could reasonably be no.
But notice that the answer is also related to the size. Because if the bureaucracy is smaller, you can finish the evaluation sooner, possibly soon enough that the evaluation results are still relevant by the time you finish. Having fewer rules allows you to have better rules, because the fewer you have the more time and other resources you have to make sure each is doing more good than harm.
I would agree it is impossible to prevent all potential misunderstanding when writing for a large audience, but various methods can make this kind of misunderstanding less likely:
- Emphasize qualifiers like "some", "most", "often", "sometimes", "not all", "many", etc.
- Anticipate and explicitly disclaim possible misinterpretations
- Acknowledge valid counter arguments
- Be very precise and explicit about our intended mentioning
Remember this folks when voting for people who advocate for privatizing or de-regulating industries.
Corporate bureaucracies can absolutely be just as terrible. But the problem isn't that a bureaucracy exists, it's that there is a law requiring the approval of a specific bureaucracy.
If a corporate bureaucracy is slow and inefficient, that sucks, but it creates an opportunity for somebody else to be less slow and less inefficient. If a government bureaucracy is slow and inefficient, can you start your own and go into competition with them?
- Google: 100,000
- Procter and Gamble: 100,000
- GlaxoSmithKline: 100,000
(Weird how the figures for the first three random companies I looked up are so close...)
- Health and Human Services: 80,000
- Uber: 20,000
- FDA: 15,000
- Sanofi Pasteur (working on coronavirus vaccine): 15,000
- CDC: 10,000
The good comes with the bad. There is a lot of nuance that such blanket statements generally don't capture.