Bureaucratie
Bureaucracy - a word coined during the French and Indian War, was a sarcastic term right from the get go.
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"Government by Desks" was used to describe insensitivity by government rule makers who either didn't care or who didn't understand how their activity obstructed commerce.
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Gourney never wrote much, but his disciples who accompanied him recorded his sayings.
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One of them was "laisser faire, laisser passer" meaning literally "to let do" and "to let pass."
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It would be another 20 years that these concepts were again upheld by Adam Smith in his 1776 book, Wealth of Nations, considered the foundations of Capitalism.
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"In 1751, Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay became France's Administrator of Commerce. An outraged Gournay railed against numerous governmental regulations that he judged to be suppressing business activity. To symbolize a government run by insensitive rule-makers and rule-enforcer who did not understand or care about the consequences of their actions, he coined the sarcastic term 'bureaucratie" -- government by desks."
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In 1743 and 1756 he accompanied Gournay, the intendant of commerce, during Gournay's tours of inspection in the provinces. (Gournay's bye-word on the government's proper involvement in the economy – "laisser faire, laisser passer" – would pass into the vocabulary of economics.)
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Anne Robert Jacques Turgot was one of his of Gournay's disciples.
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It was coined in the mid-18th century by the French economist Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay,[18] and was a satirical pejorative from the outset.[19] Gournay never wrote the term down, but was later quoted at length in a letter from a contemporary:
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The late M. de Gournay... sometimes used to say: "We have an illness in France which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called bureaumania." Sometimes he used to invent a fourth or fifth form of government under the heading of "bureaucracy."
— Baron von Grimm[10]
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The first known English-language use dates to 1818.[17] Here, too, the sense was pejorative, with Irish novelist Lady Morgan referring to "the Bureaucratie, or office tyranny, by which Ireland has so long been governed."[20]
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The dehumanizing effects of excessive bureaucracy became a major theme in the work of Franz Kafka, and were central to his novels, The Castle and The Trial.[12]
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And we had one here in Winchester. James Wood was its face. Founder of Winchester VA, and its organizing principle in the form of old Frederick County's first Clerk of Court.
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Lots of records show fees, fines, debts listed. Debt was a form of currency as it is now. Lawsuits with those debts attached to all of our great founders at that time.
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We know James Wood dies 6 November 1759. We know this because the date was inscribed on a "mourning ring," according toWinchester, Virginia And Its Beginnings, 1743-1814 by Katherine Glass Greene, page 111.
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But before James Wood dies, over on the other side of the big Atlantic pond, a Frenchman in his official capacity as head of commerce, coins the word "Bureaucratie" after touring the French countryside in 1756.
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