In Denmark, my country, approx. one third of the grown-ups are employed by our authorities.
That is: if you this very day decided, that you would shake hands with each and every one of them at a ratio of one handshake per day (i.e. using the speed and efficiency of an average, Danish civil servant), it would take you more than two thousand years before you were through with it.
It would take you longer to say a simple "Hello" to each one of them than the lapse of time from the Birth of Jesus Christ till today.
This immense number of public employees has given the Scandinavian countries an indestructible, eternal structure, that no one wanted.
But we weren's asked, so we got it anyway.
Then, who cares?
The politicians are to scared to do anything. They justly fear, that their civil servants as their revenge will make them appear stupid in newspapers and on television and thereby putting an end to their comfortable, well-paid lives.
As it is illustrated by the episode with the stupid supplies for the Danish soldiers in Iraq.
They had asked for bullet-proof wests, and they got lawn-mowers, and salt to use on icy streets, and last but not least a few hundred pounds of birds-seed.
The Danish Secretary of Defence survived this assault, but he was totally ridiculed and he never again tried to decide against the saying of his "experts".
The two third of the Danish population, not employed by the authorities, don't stand a chance against this public paid red-tape-brotherhood, that is crawling all over the Inner City of Copenhagen.
One third of the population depends for their survival on the public wellfare-programmes, that are controlled 100% by civil servants.
The last one third of the Danish population is proudly and ambitiously earning what they need for the support of their families and themselves with their work, and they know, that if they insult this monster-army of public-paid-for-experts, they risk all of a sudden, as we and our children, to wake up in another country, stripped of everything except for the very little they and their family have been able to carry with them in their hands and on their backs.
By the way: the man on the picture of this blog-post is not asleep.
