Bureaucrats as obstacles

I was reading an older article (May 2010) on Greece, in The Times:

The violence came as negotiations were concluding between the socialist government of George Papandreou, the IMF and the EU over a multi-billion-euro rescue package for Greece. …Economists regard the bloated civil service with its jobs for life and generous pensions as a cancer consuming the country’s resources. The older generation, the experts grimly concur, turned the state into a giant cash machine to be plundered at will. …Bureaucrats will raise their fists at the barricades in a general strike and protests on Wednesday to protect their considerable perks from the IMF. They and other public sector workers are virtually unsackable, can retire as early as 45 and get bonuses for using a computer, speaking a foreign language and arriving at work on time. Some of them get as many as four extra months’ salary a year, compared with the 14 months that are paid to other Greek workers. One of the most generous bonuses is paid to unmarried daughters of dead employees in state-controlled banks: they can inherit their parents’ pensions. …It costs more to transport a sack of potatoes from northern Greece to Athens than from Athens to Dusseldorf, because haulage, like many other sectors of the Greek economy, is an impenetrable cartel. When Michalos started a commodities trading business in London in the 1980s, the paperwork took him 48 hours, he said. In Greece’s “Soviet-style” economy he had to go through 117 bureaucratic procedures to get the right government permits. A wealthy friend of his had taken 10 years to win permission to put up a hotel.

I found this comment from a Greek (zorba :)):

In many ways it is even worse than that. Compensation is only part of the problem.

If Greek public workers were paid based on their contribution to GDP, the pay for many of them would actually be negative (instead of a paycheck they would owe money at the end of each month). This is because the de-facto function of many of these bureaucrats is to actually hinder whatever little work the productive portion of the Greek economy is still able to muster. 

If you have ever pursued a building permit or the opening of a business in Greece you understand what I mean. In essence, many of these bureaucrats exist only to support the issuance of a multitude on unnecessary permits and regulations. There are many cases where the permitting process itself was conceived to “create [public sector] jobs”.

This is precisely the observation I've made years ago about the bureaucracy in Romania: it is not just the cost of maintaining it, but the fact that it tries to justify its existence (and extract an extra rent via bribes while they're at it) by raising arbitrary obstacles that only they can remove in front of the people who try to make something happen.

The Left keep inventing these fanciful terms like "civil servants", "enforcing standards", etc. to make it look like these bureaucrats serve a necessary purpose. And they start serving a useful purpose, but with so much power they inevitably end up using it to serve their own interests and extract rents on our backs. And they usually do so in very destructive ways, economically speaking.