There is a strong tendancy for such organizations to be run for the benefit of those in charge. This has profound implications for those in the agency and for those they are to serve.

A bureaucracy is a formal organization that derives all or a substantial portion of its budget from transfers. When the bureaucracy is a government agency, these exchanges are not made on the basis of mutual consent. I do not, for example, willingly give the Forest Service money to subsidize clearcutting in the Gallatin National Forest. It impairs my viewshed, silts my irrigation system, assaults my ecological and economic sensitivities, and lowers the value of my property. Unfortunately, we have no choice but to pay for these programs that reduce both our welfare and our sense of what is right.

What's worse, the Forest Service cannot go bankrupt. Its programs pay off too many politicians and special intersts to prevent this economically rational and environmentally preferrable outcome. Unlike Apple Computer, the Forest Service can lose money for 95 years and persist. So long as their programs reward politicians and their political clientele, they can mix good deeds with genuine plunder.

Governments have no monopoly on bureaucratic organization. Most corporations have divisions that derive income from transfers within the company, e.g. public affairs departments. These units, however, are rarely if ever dominant. Rather, they are subordinate to the divisions that generate income by selling products to willing buyers. While research and public affairs departments are bureaucratic in structure, their pathologies are smaller and their behavior far more responsive to the organization's mission than that of government agencies. Deviations are constrained by those who watch the bottom line.

This point is critical to understanding bureaucratic behavior; however noble and inspired their genesis, bureaucracies are ultimately run for the benefit of the head bureaucrats and the clientele upon whom they depend. There is a historical, near gravitational, pull towards this outcome. Resistance requires intelligence, integrity, and a continuously reinforced sense of purpose. Few organizations have it.

When public surveillance is difficult, we can expect bureaucracies' self-serving tendancies to become more pronounced. For instance, although both have strayed from their alleged purpose, we would expect the CIA to be more corrupt than the BIA. Fortunately for their leaders, we will never know.

Returning to the theme of bureaucratic perversities, compare university parking with that of shopping malls. In malls, employees, including managers, park not near the entrance but rather in an out-of-the-way, inconvenient location. The decision-makers who determine parking rules find it beneficial to reserve the most convenient parking for customers.

In contrast, however, central administrators at universities and government agencies have preferential, often specifically designated parking spots marked with titles if not names. Even a former university president, driven from office by gross improprieties if not criminal violations, retained his preferential parking privileges. The perfidious president preserved his privileges.

In general, bureaucrats make rules to maximize their convenience and control over resources. This logic trumps the purpose justifying their creation. What does it matter if mere professors, those who do the actual teaching and research and students who pay the tuition, must park in the dark and slog through through seven months of Montana slush if those who make the rules are spared these costs? A mall based on such privilege would soon lose business, but rulemakers in universities are insulated from such pressures.

None of this is surprising. And it would be as naive to rail against as to protest gravity, or the preferential treatment of contributors by politicians. That is the way things work. While this behavior erodes morale and causes no end of mischief, the costs take many years to accumulate. By then, the culprits are often retired and on retainer.

In principle, the specific example is trivially easy to fix. Ration the parking spaces by price. People who enjoy walking can also enjoy parking in a cheap or free area. Those who are infirmed or busy, pack heavy loads, or dislike exercise can allocate more of their scarce resources to preferential parking spaces and cut back on other luxuries. Truly handicapped individuals can have reserved parking. I've yet to hear a reasonable objection to this.

Will this obvious reform be enacted at universities across the land? Such a reform would require those who now receive preferential treatment at little cost to pay for their privilege. It was indeed an aberration when Congress made itself subject to the rules by which the rest of us must live. This too will erode. For good or bad, it is one of the verities of life that bureaucracies are run largely for the benefit of the bureaucrats in them. To expect otherwise is to confuse hopes with expectations.

This essay is dedicated to the faculty and administration of Montana State University in the hope that I never again have to sit through a dinner party where conversation is dominated by the subject of on- and off-campus parking.