In general, we shall not be hastened to ask for individuals’ replacement, but shall fiercely demand to cancel useless sinecures.

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, page 223 (in French)
La République française, February 29th, 1848

Here is an extremely short article in which Frédéric Bastiat is questioning the benefit of having “sous-préfectures”, which he considers to be nothing else but a mailbox adding an administrative layer between the prefect and the local governments.

Today’s quote is indeed very much a contemporary issue, or even more of an issue nowadays. If a reform in 1926 has suppressed roughly hundred “sous-préfectures”, they have not been outright cancelled as Frédéric Bastiat wished as far back as 1848. A new administrative layer has even been created with the “regional prefect”. One of the issue with civil servants is that a useless man is perfectly able to render himself “necessary” and that bureaucrats, in case they find themselves to have nothing to do, will find ways to do something to justify their own existence. This can be observed notably with the profusion of regulatory “agencies” and “high authorities” being currently all the rage in France. The pity is that, as Frédéric Bastiat will explain one year later, “when it comes to civil servants, there is no halfway house: if they are not very useful indeed, they are harmful”.