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Jerk People Around. Once bureaucrats have their rents and their power, what do they do with them? Well, they "serve the public." If they don't actually serve the public very well, there is not much that can be done about it, since they will have the protection both of the civil service system and of the unions, and it may be all but impossible to fire them. So why not have some fun in the meantime? Just say no. The public needs to be reminded that they are at your mercy, so you might as well make things as difficult for them as possible. It helps that an inefficient "spend your budget" bureaucracy is going to have tons of rules and regulations, where they are most likely to be incoherent and even self-contradictory. So you will have no difficulty quoting one rule to one person and another to another, requiring them to do different things, both of which can then be retroactively invalidated by a switch in the rules. James Madison wrote: It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed? [Federalist Paper No. 62]# Don't Rock the Boat. An excellent way to avoid responsibility in bureaucracy is not to be noticed. That is one meaning of not rocking the boat, or not making waves. And, of course, an excellent way of not being noticed is to pass the buck. Most Americans have by now probably had the experience of dealing with a government agency or a large corporation where it was all but impossible to find anyone actually willing to admit that your problem falls under their authority. One form of this is long waits on the telephone, after being put on

Several articles in the paper have questioned the bureucracy of Riverside County DA office of Rod Pacheco.