Discussion on Bureaucracy

The Mises Circle at UT will be discussing Ludwig von Mises’s classic political book, Bureaucracy. Mises’s motivation in writing the book was his concern with the spread of socialist ideals and the increasing bureaucratization of economic life during the 20th century. Mises’s main purpose is to demonstrate that the negative aspects of bureaucracy are not a result of bad policies or corruption as the public tends to think but are necessarily built into bureaucratic structures due to the very tasks these structures have to deal with. This book focuses on a comparison between private enterprise on the one hand and bureaucratic agencies/public enterprise on the other.