Sunday Pause For Thought

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Andrew Gilligan:

"....it is far from clear that the 18-fold growth of the Cabinet Office since 1997 has made Britain 18 times better governed. The Ministry of Defence employs 29,000 people in its procurement branch. Its equivalent in a country under actual military threat, Israel, employs a reported 400. "

It has been said that bureaucracy is the art of making the possible, impossible; that in any bureaucracy paper-work increases as you spend more and more time reporting on the less and less being done; that as the degree of bureaucratic discretion increases, so too does delay and expense; and that you will never understand bureaucracies until you realise that for a bureaucrat procedures are everything and outcomes, nothing - for bureaucrats, also read politicians!

Are not those employed (bureaucrats and politicians) supposed to do what the employer (the majority of the people) want? And not vice versa?