THOSE BUREAUCRATS!
Senator Ernst is once again belaboring bureaucrats; once again suggesting that bureaucrats are bad and we need to understand this once and for all and be rid of as many as possible. Thank you Senator Ernst for pointing out the failures of our bureaucracy. It has been some time since you last opined on the failures of bureaucrats and the necessity of keeping an eye on them, if not firing them en masse.
Some clarification is in order however. I think the first thing we should do is to determine what a bureaucrat is - - come up with some sort of definition so we know what we are talking about with some specificity. I expect that most of you, the reader, who reads this, works in an office. This office is more than likely part of a business, corporate most likely, with many employees with jobs sitting at a desk and performing tasks that have been assigned.
If the situation in the above paragraph applies to you, you are a bureaucrat. Now you may not be called a bureaucrat, but nevertheless you have the same role in the organization you work for as a person has in a government office - - doing the jobs that have been assigned, usually sitting at a desk in front of a computer or by a phone dealing with the public. The difference is that you work at a private office and the bureaucrat, as Senator Ernst calls them, works in a government office.
Where you work determines what you are called and by whom. It is most certain that Senator Ernst has a staff. These people are bureaucrats. The person writing her opinion pieces is a bureaucrat. If you work in a private office performing the necessary functions for the company or organization you work for, you are a bureaucrat regardless of what you otherwise might call yourself. If you work for Blue Shield or Wells Fargo in a large building with a large number of employees, you are a bureaucrat as surely as you are working for the Department of Labor in Washington or the Transportation Department of the State of Iowa. There is no difference: one works for a private company and one works for a government doing jobs that need to be done in order for the company or the agency in question to function as it is intended to function - - in one case to make money and in the other to serve the public.
Senator Ernest digs through tons of files apparently to discover malfeasance in our bureaucracy. She or her own personal bureaucrats, her staff, find some just as there is embezzlement from the local school, the dentist's office, or the Moose Lodge. It happens. What is disturbing about Senator Ernest, her opinion piece's purpose appears to be in support of the idea that bureaucrats are bad, all bureaucrats for that matter; that they exist superficially and without much function and we should be rid of as many as possible as quickly as possible.
The principle behind Senator Ernst's opinion piece printed in the Newton Daily News, once again, must be the belief that the American public, her public, the people who voted for her or may vote for her in the future, are stupid. It is difficult to find any other basis for her opinion piece to be presented to the public in the manner in which it is presented. At the very least it is annoying and at worst, destructive.
Richard E H Phelps II
Mingo
