Just totally brilliant as usual, Nick! I'm glad Tim articulated what I feel when I look at your work...saved me the trouble of trying to come up with something half as good.
Although I'm late jumping in on the bureaucracy is insanity (and sometimes evil) theme, I can't help but share two personal stories from the US. We (unfortunately not for long, I fear) don't have quite the embedded bureaucracies as you folks across the pond do, but anyone who deals with what we do have is horrorstruck at the prospect of it getting worse.
First example - my sister lives in my grandmother's house, which is in a floodplain (never used to be, but development and levees upstream made it so). So, the government mandates that everyone in the flood plain must have government-provided flood insurance through FEMA, which is not cheap. It was terribly hard for my disabled sister to pay for it, but our family always played by the rules, so with her part-time income and help from me, she kept it current. Well, a few years back they had a bad flood. Found out that half the neighbors had ignored the rules and had no flood insurance. What happened to them? Well, private relief agencies came in, took pity on the poor people who couldn't afford insurance, and a number of them were made whole in a matter of weeks. How long did my sister wait for money from her government insurance plan, which was a major hardship for her? Nine MONTHS, complete with conflicting answers, confusing paperwork, and utter incompetence at every turn.
And more to the business point Nick raised. I have been a musician on the side for over thirty years. All the part-time bands I've been in really manage to do is pay some of their expenses. Ahhh, but the government in its wisdom wants to capture every tax dollar, so put in rules requiring venues hiring bands to report payments to bands. No problem (well ok, because of our tax system complexity it is a problem), we'll dutifully report that income and follow all the tax codes in claiming expenses. Guess what, as with many musicians, the perfectly legal expenses that were deductible meant we were losing money, and could claim a loss on taxes. So then, our tax rules are that if you claim a loss on something like part-time musicianship, the tax authorities declare that it is really a hobby and forbid you from claiming a loss. This then puts the hiring venue in a position where they still have to show payments to a musician, but the musician doesn't put it on the tax return because he's been told he can't. So after another few years (or maybe only one) of not showing the income, a letter from the bureaucrats comes threatening you for not reporting the income that they told you not to report...!! Damned if you do, damned if you don't, but the bureaucrats who would never make it in the private sector and can't ever be fired absent a pronouncement from God go merrily on collecting paychecks and better benefits than anyone else in society and are never held accountable.
OK, I feel better now. I think...B
B
:C:CB
