Obviously any civil servant who does not do a useful job does a damaging one by the very fact of taking action.

Frédéric Bastiat
Economic Sophisms Third Series

Unfortunately, this truth is not limited to bureaucrats within government offices anymore but has expanded to overstaffed administrations and big business. Each of us need to ask oneself what is the reason why we go and work every morning; when salary becomes the only motivation, chances are that, instead of being useful to society, one is becoming a nuisance each time one is taking action.

It is through four circulars he dreamt about, coming from the Minister of the Interior, the Minister of Trade, the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister for Religion that Bastiat shows how one can, in good faith, become useless in the work one does and therefore become a nuisance upon each action that is taken as soon as one is not lazy. The ultimate proof of this is that after only four pages, the Home Office remains the only standing ministry among the four, the other three having been dissolved upon recognising how useless they were, and thus stopping all damages that they were generating, as unintentional as they may have been.