Listeners have probably heard the word “bureaucracy” on the podcast before, but what does it mean?

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Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Brittany: Hi, Ronni.

Ronni: Hey, Brittany.

Brittany: So, you, and by you, I mean the listeners probably heard us talking about the term bureaucracy a lot. I think we throw that around, but I don’t know that we’ve ever really talked about it. And I know kids are smart and they can pick up, you don’t even have to say the definition of something kids just know, which is one reason I think kids are so amazing when I was a teacher I loved that, is they just absorb everything. And it’s so cool to me. I think as adults, it’s harder for us to absorb information, even though I think you and I are both who we’d consider ourselves lifelong learners, we’re always learning, but I feel like it’s harder, but I didn’t know what this word meant when I was younger and before I dropped out of college, I was studying political science and I heard it thrown around all the time, but I always think that you don’t really.

Ronni: I don’t think I meant what it meant, knew what it meant until I was an adult. Because also you just hear, you’re like, yeah, the bureaucracy. And I also can’t say it very well, but I’m like, I actually don’t really know what it means.

Brittany: Exactly. That’s kind of my point. And it wasn’t until I felt like you have to live something or experience it to really understand it. And it’s funny you say you can’t say it, I took French for 13 years, it’s a French word, and just learned how to spell it. And even it’s still really hard. Okay, what does bureaucracy mean? So, I thought it would be to give you just a kind of real-world example, a fun little example. But the main thing to keep in mind is it describes our government, I can’t think of a better word except for maybe corrupt to explain what our government is. Connor and I used to do these ism specials and are you familiar with that term, the ism? Yes, And we haven’t done an ism in a while. And even though this one doesn’t end in an ism, I think it still is.

Ronni: Bureaucracy ism.

Brittany: That is not a real word, but it should be. So, okay, so what is it? So let’s imagine for a minute that you want to build a house, and this should seem pretty simple, right? Property rights are a big thing in this country, the main thing in this country. So, it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. You buy your property, you build a house and everybody lives happily ever after, but that is not what happens. And I have never built a house. Have you built a house before from scratch?

Ronni: I have not, no.

Brittany: And now, I don’t mean with her own two hands though. I would be so impressed if Ronni was out there.

Ronni: Actually, the house that I live in now, we bought it, but the original owners, they were part of a program in which it was a bunch of different families and they all got together and helped build each other’s houses. So, the house that I live in was built by the previous owner, so that’s cool.

Brittany: Yeah, that is really cool. I’ve always thought that was fun until you learn what bureaucracy means. So, okay, so before you can build your house, you have to walk through, imagine you’re walking through a maze. I don’t know, have you ever been to a corn maze with your kids?

Ronni: Oh, yeah. Those are fun.

Brittany: Right? I never have, but I thought that would be a good example. But let’s say that every time, every corner you walk through in the maze, there’s some obstacle that you have to go through. I know that not everyone is probably Red Harry Potter, I’m a big Harry Potter fan, but there’s this part in the fourth book where I used to go through this maze and every time, every corner, there’s some villain thing he has to be. And so that’s kind of how I think about bureaucracy. So, to build this house and the house is at the end of the maze and you’re starting at the beginning, you have to go through all these obstacles and why do you have to do this? What is the point? You just want to buy a house or build a house, excuse me. Well, it’s because the government sets a whole bunch of rules and a lot of the time they’re not necessary. And I think our listeners, and we already know that there’s so many rules that you wonder how this becomes a rule. It feels like government people were just sitting around like, I’m bored today. What can I do? You know what silly rule?

Ronni: Or I think they have rules just so later if they decide for some reason, they want to get someone in trouble, they’re like, oh, I think there’s a rule somewhere that I can get them in trouble for. And I think that’s the only reason why.

Brittany: Yeah, maybe that’s a good point. Like fines or I think there are some people, there’s the term, Karen, you hear the term Karen a lot, which is these people that they always want to speak to the manager at a restaurant if something doesn’t go their way or they want to call the police on everybody, that kind of thing. I think you have people who honestly think that they’re doing the right thing by making all these rules. And I think sometimes it comes down to control too. You want to control people’s behavior. But so, in this situation, the government sets all these rules for building houses. So let’s talk about what those rules are. So ,first, before you can even start building anything, you have to get a permit, like a permission slip that says from the government, yeah, you can build a house, but that’s not as simple as just like, oh, let me go to city hall and get this. So, before you can even get the permit, which you have to get before you can even build the house, you have to hire a bunch of different people to look at your land and look at your building plans and make sure it meets the government standards. And this can sometimes be because it depends on where you live. This could be three to four different people just in that procedure. It’s crazy. So, then you have to check with your local governments and make sure you’re obeying all their zoning laws. So, what are zoning laws? These are, it’s funny, when I first got involved in local politics, a lot of it was with zoning because zoning is terrible. So, zoning is basically, it’s not even a city. I think there are city zoning laws, but your neighborhood can get together and say, we don’t want you to do this. I remember in a house I lived in, they were going to remodel the owners and build something upstairs, and people were like, no, you can’t even build an upstairs. You’re going to block my view of the mountain, or you’re not going to do this. And it’s so funny to me because people just want to control everything. They call these people NIMBY’s. That means not, oh, you haven’t.

Ronni: I have not heard that term before.

Brittany: It’s a good one. It means not in my backyard. So, that means people that are like, I don’t want this in my neighborhood. And it, it’s silly things. It’s not like things you should be, it’s not like, oh, I’m going to build a huge parking lot in the middle of your neighborhood, which it could be that too, but it’s just like where the neighborhood I lived in, there was a small plot of land and this guy just wanted to build a small house and they were like, no, it’s too small. And because your backyard wouldn’t be, or your front yard wouldn’t reach the sidewalk and the exact inches, it’s just super silly. Ronni.

Ronni: No, they do have those. Actually, when we moved into the house that we’re in now, it was our first time buying a house. And so in going through all of the paperwork and reading all of these zoning laws or what was allowed in my neighborhood, it was very interesting where you can build your house up to, you can’t have your driveway extending or your garage big one, extending past a certain thing, but then your porch can be, or your front door can be only this far up. And those are different distances to the sidewalk and it’s so many different things. And then they specify what animals you can have. I actually read these very clearly because I did not want to move into a house that would not allow me to have backyard chickens. And there’s some places that don’t allow it. And I had chickens that I wanted to keep, so.

Brittany: Always wanted to do that. But yeah, it’s just all these silly rules and you have to remember, if you break these rules, you have to pay to fix them all, even though the government set these laws. So, it’s just crazy. So, yeah, you got to check with zoning people to make sure that that’s, and usually, it’s like a community zoning board, and they’re usually made up of just really difficult people to work with, but it’s even more than that. So, if you live in California, you sometimes, if you’re anywhere near the beach, you have to deal with agencies like the California Coastal Commission. And this is a crazy story. So, there’s a guy who owned a property that backed up to the beach, and the government decided that as he was in a wheelchair, he had a terrible stroke. And the government decided that because they had jurisdiction over jurisdiction, meaning they were allowed to set rules for his house that was in their zoning area, kind of that he was not allowed to build a wheelchair ramp. So, here’s somebody who just wanted to build a wheelchair ramp, and he wasn’t allowed to because the California Coastal Commission said no. So, crazy. And then it gets even worse than that, Ronni, because, so that would be a state agency, but then you have to deal with federal agencies like the EPA, sometimes people who want to build their houses in rural areas. There’s these things like there’s this, if you have a little puddle that shows up for three months during the year, they call these a vernal pool. The government can say, that’s protected Waterland, you’re endangering species and they can take you to court. One family threatened to find them $75,000 a day until they paid back for having this little puddle that they said made it a protected wetland. So, they said they couldn’t build their house on the property. It got crazy. It’s just nuts. So, that case just went to the Supreme Court, actually, cases don’t usually go to the Supreme Court twice. And this one did. It was so complicated, and that just argued this year. So, we don’t know what’s going to happen yet. Actually, this is another example of bureaucracy. The first time it went to the Supreme Court, which is the highest court in the land, they had to go just to get the right to sue the EPA, because the EPA is so bureaucratic within itself that you don’t even have the right to sue them if you don’t like what they do if you think it’s unconstitutional. So, crazy stuff. So, what does all this mean? All these different agencies that you have to go through are like a stop in the maze that stops you. So, you got to get the permit, then you have to get the people to look at it. So, it’s this crazy maze. And the really crazy thing is you often don’t even know all these rules exist. They don’t tell you. So, let’s say you start building and then another agency’s like, well, we didn’t give you the right permit. Sometimes different agencies will disagree on things. So, this is a really crazy process. But what we call this all the different, I like to think of it as hoops. You have to jump through all these different stops in the maze that is bureaucracy, where there’s all these different steps and all these different agencies and all these different permits. You have to get to do one simple thing, build a house. So, that is, I just gave an example of building a house, but oh my goodness, there’s so many things and this never runs smoothly. People have to pay for this. I mean, pay thousands and thousands of dollars just to get these permission slips. And then of course it takes sometimes years and years and years. So, that is bureaucracy. It’s not just houses. Ronni, can you think I’m putting on the spot here any other examples of a government bureaucracy?

Ronni: I think the thing that’s fresh on my mind is thinking about schooling and education, and you’re, so, over the past few years, I’ve tried out many different schooling options with my kids. So, we’ve done pure homeschooling, we’ve done where we’re homeschooling through a charter school, we’ve tried public school, so, we’ve been trying different options, but the amount of effort that it takes to go from one, especially if you’re going into a homeschooling option or something similar to that, the amount of you have to get a permit and then you have to file an affidavit and has to be notarized. And there’s so many different hoops, and it’s always such a struggle to figure out, okay, what am I supposed to do? What do I need to file? Who do I talk to that actually knows all of this stuff?

Brittany: Yeah, it’s so crazy. But that, I mean in a nutshell is what we’re talking about with government bureaucracy and sometimes it’s a life and death thing. The VA, that’s the Veterans Association, they help. Veterans are turning from war and a lot of them have terrible mental health issues and some of them lost body parts in war. They get really injured and it’s so bureaucratic, there’s so many hoops. You have to jump through that often people don’t get the care they need or they have to wait years. There were made headlines about seven years ago where people were having to wait years and years, and sometimes they weren’t even getting the help and people were dying in the process. And what happens is you get what’s called the runaround, and that is you said that sometimes the people don’t even know the rules. Let’s say you go, you’re building a house and you go to one agency and they’re like, well, I don’t know what you need. And then you go to another one and they’re like, well, they should have told you this. And my favorite, not my favorite, but I think it’s just ridiculous. It shows how bureaucratic government is. You have no idea how many times they’ll just lose the paperwork altogether. You’ll go and you’ll be like, I filed that permit. And they’ll say, no, you didn’t. We never got it. So it’s just so crazy. And then you have different agencies having different jurisdictions. Again, that means they have the power to make laws for that area. So, you’ll have, like I mentioned before, the city has rules, the neighborhood has rules, the county has rules. The state, it’s so much, we call this red tape, the red meaning it’s like a stop. Think of stop signs and stop lights. Red is like, no, but it’s like that maze of red tape. So you keep getting caught in it and you don’t know what to do. And this is really problematic because it impedes our ability to do anything to really live free because there’s so many things. One thing Connor does a lot is the children’s, what is it? Entrepreneur market. I think I said that wrong, but that’s part of the laws he changed, is they were going to make kids fill out tax forms and things like that. And it’s like you’re making kids jump through hoops and it’s almost like training them to live in this bureaucratic society, but we don’t want to do that. Instead, we want to create a world where there are less rules like this and where people can live freely. So, that’s one thing to keep in mind when you hear us throw out the term bureaucracy or bureaucratic or bureaucrat, which would be the different politicians who make all these rules. Think of it as that maze where you just want to do one thing and the government is making you go through all these things and pay all this money and spend lots of years before you can do a simple thing, build a house. So, we will wrap it up there. Always please remember to like and subscribe and share the podcast with friends. We love getting new listeners. And until next time, Ronni, we will talk to you soon.

Ronni: All right, see you soon.