Bureaucrats lament ministerial dithering.

Instead, it is Japan s bureaucrats who are celebrating.

Bureaucratic entrepreneurs, on the other hand, take advantage of such opportunities to adjust and promote policies.

Ever since the referendum failures of both the European constitution and the Lisbon treaty, the EU has been flying on autopilot, run by its bureaucrats.

But there will be less of it than in societies run by bureaucrats, courts, and policeman.

However, since these petty bureaucrats power is almost absolute, they also control the channels for addressing grievances.

In factories as well, Party bureaucrats wanted to know everything and decide everything.

High level bureaucrats quickly discovered that licenses could be bartered for favors, while politicians saw in the system the means to help important financial backers.

And, to protect their jobs, Japan s bureaucrats are now aligning their interests with those who see themselves as having lost out in the Koizumi years.

But even more significantly, its intentions addressed a cardinal question for Japan who should rule, bureaucratic mandarins or elected officials?

Government bureaucrats used to target industrial research in the old days, but these efforts have been largely abandoned since the stock market collapse.

Since they lack the legitimate authority of elected or high level appointed officials, bureaucratic entrepreneurs must remain cognizant of the need to balance initiative with loyalty.

Turkey s bureaucrats, politicians, and citizens united to fulfill the Copenhagen criteria for EU membership and tolerated the pain of the IMF directed structural adjustment programs.

Bureaucrats, not businessmen, controlled the commanding heights of the economy, and India shackled itself to statist controls that emphasized distributive justice over economic growth, stifled free enterprise, and discouraged foreign investment.

After all, although modern market economics provides a sound framework for policymaking as Chinese bureaucrats are eagerly learning the idea of a planned economy emerged in the nineteenth century as a counter orthodoxy to address market failures.

As US President Barack Obama s domestic opponents resist his signature health care legislation, owing to the wealth transfers that it implies, Japanese bureaucrats are trying to recover the authority to administer tax revenue to support social welfare programs.

A few decades ago, it was Japan that thought it was going to be Number One, and its businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats were not shy about letting the rest of the world know.

They also want to stop Abe from dismantling and privatizing one of their central fiefdoms, the Social Security Agency. In this struggle, the mandarins are aligning themselves with the DPJ, at least to the general public s eye, because it has proposed merging the Social Security Agency with the National Tax Agency, a move that would ensure government jobs for the former s employees.