Mobility and Bureaucracy

From a long interesing post by Reihan Salam on David Brooks, Gladwell, upward mobility, with this observation on American bureaucracy:

There’s something else that comes to mind, namely that our mental map of society only rarely captures the gritty terrain. I’m not sure I can articulate this very well, but I’ll try. My mother is a health worker and my father is an accountant who works pretty much exclusively with tiny immigrant-owned businesses and recent arrivals. A lot of the work he does is unpaid, e.g., helping people figure out how to navigate the social services bureaucracy, etc. Through both of them, I’ve learned a lot about the way the plans of the administrative state mesh with the “illegible” ethnic economy of the city. The most virtuous, hard-working people, it often seems, are the ones who most aggressively game the system, which they see in amoral, impersonal terms (which makes sense, as I’m calling it “the system”). Just as much of the prosperity of the Washington metropolitan area is parasitic and illusory — aha! we’ve turned an undesirable civil service job into a lucrative contractor position! — it’s hard not to think that the skids of upward mobility are occasionally greased by fraud. This is one reason my father has always believed that the IRS needs a much larger budget, both to aggressively audit rich tax cheats (he hates them) and also to curb low-level abuse that undermines trust in “the system.” Ronald Reagan blasted welfare queens. And yet Medicaid mills have helped build the fortunes of plenty of otherwise upstanding citizens. Of course I think this is a bad thing. But it’s complicated. The American administrative state isn’t Suharto’s Indonesia — but in some places and times, it can get badly frayed.

I'm not sure how one addresses the problem he touches on here. And I'm not sure it's simply a bureaucracy that seems inscrutable, so it's okay to defraud it. My impression is that farmers think FSA bureaucrats are pretty good (they should, because they're mostly neighbors) but certainly a minority think it's okay to evade rules (yes, I'm thinking payment limitation and eligibility requirements) just the same.