Great Primer on why bureaucratic / regulatory purgatory has descended on our heads in this blog post at the American Interest site.

America’s political institutions are so fouled up at both the politics/decision-making and the bureaucratic/administrative levels that one can actually make a plausible case that all the variance we are trying to account for lives here. One can make this case regardless of political affinities, too. Liberals argue that our economic situation, touched off by the financial collapse of autumn 2008, is all the fault of anti-government, market-fundamentalist types obsessed with deregulation. Conservatives argue that our economic situation is what it is because we are hopelessly in debt thanks to the futile and counterproductive meliorist entitlement policies of bleeding-heart liberals who invariably care more about intentions than outcomes. Both are partly right, but also partly wrong or, better, incomplete, in their analysis—which brings us to part three, next time.

Couple of updates, Alan’s post really starts here with Section 1 which provides background, that points back to Walter Russell Meade’s The Collapse of the Blue Model series I’ve posted about earlier.  Read it all, Alan says much more clearly and with more background what I have tried to say in various small ways for almost a year now.

The system is systematically broken, it has become so broken that it is self reinforcing and is pointing the nose of the ship of state down, harder and harder as we try to fix it.