The social debate about a general reduction in bureaucracy, one of the major reform challenges of modern times, is gathering pace. The burden on citizens/companies to provide the state with services free of charge that those affected do not want, want differently or want more efficiently is increasing everywhere.

In general, the organization, control and execution of tasks that are necessary for the planning, implementation and control of processes can be described as administration. Bureaucracy as the rule of administration is the elevation of administration to the status of reason of state. This is not negative per se, so bureaucracy, if used correctly, can have many advantages and there are good reasons to formalize and standardize certain areas of life. However, if bureaucracy becomes overpowering, the advantages turn into disadvantages. How can this happen?

In principle, efficient administration requires in-depth knowledge of the underlying processes and their process dependencies, not to mention formalization options and formalization restrictions in the process areas. If this knowledge is inaccurate, incorrect or insufficiently cross-process, something is formalized incompletely and chaotically, which is worse than never having formalized it at all.

The flexibility of action is lost without being able to achieve certainty of action and a quick result. The supposed positive of bureaucracy turns into the worst possible negative of the real world. Complicated, inflexible, expensive, slow, ineffective and ultimately unwanted. The more complex the processes and process interrelationships, the more difficult an efficient bureaucracy becomes and the more likely it is to ultimately fail.

What exactly is the problem with the excessive bureaucracy of the EU and the nation states, in this case Germany? There is too much regulation, harassment and sanctions in the wrong places and without effective controls. Bureaucracy should always focus on the final objectives, the measurement of these objectives and the costs of measurement/implementation. If the goal of an administrative process is not achieved, achieved too slowly or with too little benefit, then this administrative process must be improved.

There is nothing wrong with an improvement process if the initial process has already achieved 80% of its effect. However, if the initial process remains stuck at 20-30%, the costs for all participants increase exponentially without an improvement process being able to sharpen the focus in a meaningful way. The gap to 100% is simply too big.

This is the core problem of German bureaucracy: it usually ends up with such low target achievement figures that it helps no one, paralyzes everyone and costs without providing a comparative competitive advantage for those subject to the bureaucracy. The worst of all possible worlds. Bureaucracy unilaterally makes the bureaucrats and their helpers happy and disturbs social harmony in the worst possible way.

This kind of bureaucracy is the sure path to ruin.

The right to stand for election means that anyone of a certain age who is a German citizen and who has not been deprived of the right to vote due to political offenses may vote.

This minimum standard does not exclude retards, psychopaths and sociopaths, fanatics and zealots, as long as they have not committed a “political” offense. And the controls on delinquency are extremely lax. And this is precisely where the problem lies: with such a virtually non-existent standard, precisely those unsuitable people are attracted to politics who should never have become politicians in the first place.

A democracy can only function if it pushes the best people to make a contribution to society. And on the one hand, the best must be selected, so there must be an assessment standard that checks the prospective politicians for suitability and, on the other hand, the best must have a positive interest in serving society and their fellow human beings.

The standards to be applied could be determined by suitable scientific institutes on the one hand in feedback with a referendum on the other, so that the basis for filtering the suitable and the willing is laid democratically / professionally / scientifically.

The same should apply here: The higher the offices, the higher the standards that must be met. It is not enough to meet the minimum standards and then to have been a narcissist’s porter for 20 years in order to qualify for a high state office.

Whether there are still willing people who meet the standards and at the same time are prepared to work for a symbolic salary (current salaries of parliamentarians can be regarded as symbolic) is a question of social esteem.

People who have built up a reputation through outstanding political work will certainly be able to monetize this reputation after their political career. And whether this would be the only motivating factor remains to be seen.

If, as expected, no suitable candidates for political office can be found, either due to a lack of qualifications or a lack of pecuniary motivation, the result without representatives could not be worse than in the modern Berlin Republic, in which blind actionism does more harm to society than inaction ever could.

Democracy, as the rule of the people, is a classic paradox. The people, the actual sovereign of the state, have no power, decision-making or determining authority whatsoever in the modern form of democracy of the 22nd century.

The only way to maintain the illusion that the individual citizen has any possibility of influencing the fate of the state is to vote in an arbitrarily determined cycle. But that is not the case.

On the one hand, once elected, they do not have to adhere to election statements or program points, nor do they have to fear any kind of consequences for misconduct or wrong decisions. Only their own political clique determines whether and who has to resign for which behavior. Even then, it is not clear whether the political career was ended or only extremely slowed down and delayed.

This form of impunity and lawlessness, coupled with non-existent barriers to entry into the career of a professional politician, mainly attracts power-hungry and immoral people who are not or only rudimentarily suited to the actual task of representing the people in a meaningful and dignified manner.

But it is precisely these elected representatives, who hardly differ in their character image of a morally and ethically degenerate subject beyond party boundaries, who have a decisive influence on the fate of the people.

The envisaged separation of powers, which is intended to prevent an abuse of power, does not work, as the political office-holders largely determine the rules of the judiciary, which in turn controls the executive. There is therefore a power pyramid that only prevents the rapid and direct abuse of power, but not the creeping abuse that slowly erodes the protective mechanisms of democracy and can then lead to new forms of rule.

In recent history, Turkey and Russia are some of these examples.

Thus the paradox of modern German democracy is that the people are the rulers and yet have absolutely nothing to say.

To change this, the entire social system needs to be rethought. What may the parliament alone decide, where should the whole people be consulted? We need to move away from a party democracy towards a grassroots democracy with a new separation of powers that can successfully prevent the abuse of power.

A positive example of this is Switzerland