The death of functionality due to bureaucracy

A couple of weeks ago, I ranted about the way bureaucracies are relentless in pursuit of some imaginary perfection.  My focus was health care, but I noted that bureaucracies will always keep going, trying to nail every detail down, so much so that life becomes impossible.  Britain perfectly proves my point about bureaucracies:

Local government bureaucrats have had to follow 74,000 pages of new rules and instructions handed down by Whitehall over the past decade, council chiefs complained yesterday.

The forest of red tape was a product of 4,000 different laws and circulars covering everything from parish council election advice to carbon reduction targets.

The direct cost to taxpayers of demands sent down by ministers to town halls amounts to £900 million a year and the overall losses could be as high as £2.5 billion annually, the Local Government Association said.