March 30, 2017

Off-Grid living and Government Bureaucracy are totally opposed to each other. Many people go off the grid just to get away from the Bureaucrats. but you can never escape them altogether. An anonymous rancher from the mid-west tells his story:

I’m sure most everyone would agree that public service is a noble calling. We are indebted to all those since our founding fathers who have stepped up to serve the greater good. Unfortunately, serving the good of the public and that of the bureaucracy seems to be almost diametrically opposed.

I know many ranchers who have considered just moving out of the system entirely versus dealing with bureaucrats and bureaucracies. But the reality is there is no way to avoid them, no matter how frustrating, impersonal, complex, incompetent, and arrogant they may be. In fact, the reach of bureaucracies into our daily lives seems to be growing exponentially, almost at the pace of their incompetence.

In business, we have to innovate, we have to do things more efficiently (reduce overhead), we have to improve the quality and timeliness of our decision-making and we have to become more customer centric and deliver more value. It is a never-ending, daily struggle for survival that ensures that businesses have this type of focus.

The great irony is that bureaucracies, because of their nature, often perversely have the opposite incentives. They must spend all their money, grow their sphere of influence and gobble up more and more resources while often doing less and less.

Thus, innovative, cost-effective, efficient, customer focused, responsive to change, or even user-friendly are not words that one usually associates with bureaucracies, and for good reason.

For example, I recently had to go to a local social security office—local when you are a rancher includes traveling 180 miles to the nearest government office—to get a replacement social security card for my son. I won’t go through the month of wasted time attempting the process through the mail that his mother suffered through.

I knew I was in trouble when the alert security guard sent me back to my car as he spotted my pocket knife. When I returned, I had the privilege of standing in line to answer several questions on a touch screen computer so that I could be issued a number that would allow me to speak to a human.

There was not enough seating so we had to stand. The only thing to do was to watch the Social Security TV network that was playing on several big screens around the room. The weather was the focal point, along with admittedly well-conceived marketing messages that would make you inclined to be supportive of the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the job it does.

The other tidbits were kind of shocking as they were highly reflective of a political agenda, which ironically was mostly focused on global warming. While …