The Peter Principle in action

You do know the term “Peter Principle”, don’t you?  Named for educator Laurence Peter, who published a book by that name in the late 1960s, its central theme is that:

in a hierarchy, employees tend to rise to the level of their incompetence

The Peter Principle falls neatly between “Parkinson’s Law”:

work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion (C. Northcote Parkinson, 1958)

and the entire Dilbert oeuvre.

I briefly thought about this classic examination of bureaucracy and its unintended consequences while reading an op-ed piece in Saturday’s Seattle Times, but that article remained firmly in the back of my mind until I read Raye’s latest epistle in By Sand and Sea.  In her January 27 essay Not a black helicopter, but..., she quotes from an article about the bully-tactics employed by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom Delay, who are following the example already laid out by the ghouls of the executive branch by accreting all available power and authority to themselves, rewarding those subordinates who toe their line and dumping anyone who steps even a whisker out of (goose)step.

The case of Connecticut’s Christopher Shays, senior Republican on the Government Reform committee, who was bypassed for the chairmanship of that body in favor of Virginian Tom Davis, is well known.  Not coincidentally, Shays and Massachusetts Democrat Marty Meehan co-sponsored the House version of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform legislation, while Davis chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee during the 2002 campaign, raising over $180 million in hard and soft money (nearly $1 million of it from his own re-election coffers and his personal PAC).

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