On the Futility of Modern Bureaucratic States, by Dr. Jeff Mirus

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture, Oct 07, 2022

Note: Obviously many government employees do good work, but not counting military personnel, there is one government employee in the United States for every fifteen people, and of course a significant portion of government work is farmed out to private companies. In very broad terms, imagine how comprehensively we are “managed” in the modern bureaucratic state with a minimum ratio 1 to 15!

Leaders in today’s Church often claim that democracy is essential to human dignity and by far the best form of government. Of course, five hundred to a thousand years ago Catholic leaders tended to favor monarchy as the system that best reflects God’s rule. Clearly there is a lot of prejudice involved in these judgments, and perhaps the soundest position on this question is that the best form of government in each time and place is the form that, given the personnel available and the overall situation, can do the most good. The specific form has relatively little to do with it. Politics remains always the art of the possible.

Moreover, it troubles me that so many Catholic leaders constantly plump for democracy in the face of the steady deterioration of that form of government in the contemporary West.  …

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