Added the new one to my wish list. Which has about 90 items on it so we'll see....

Believe it or not, the most valuable insight into bureaucracy I've ever read was from Orson Scott Card, of all people. In Songmaster (an otherwise creepy book) he makes the point that everyone adores the Greeks for their technology and pans the Romans because they contributed nothing... when in fact they contributed bureaucracy, a form of government so stable and pernicious that remnants of it were still keeping Europe running a thousand years after Nero was dead. He compares the Roman empire to the Mongol empire and points out that while centralization is much more efficient and agile, it's also extremely fragile and volatile. bureaucracy, on the other hand, moves very slowly... in ANY direction. Kill the king and you have anarchy. Nuke all of Congress and the United States will largely keep trucking along.