All who work creatively accept certain forms of coercion that regulate and limit their ability to self-actualize themselves through their labor. This coercion comes from two sources: from their own field or profession, which enforces certain standards and expectations through competition with their fellows, and from outside, from the patronage or financing that provides the tools and resources to be able to do their work.

The scientist accepts the internal coercion of having to acquire education and compete in peer-reviewed journals. The academic has similar requirements placed on him by the university which employs him. The artist knows he must meet the expectations of critics, and those who pay money to enjoy his art. The athlete must perform in such a way that his fans and coaches find acceptable. The politician must fend off attacks from other politicians and constitutional restrictions which constantly threaten his position. Even the ship's master knows that he must not only deliver his cargo safely, but that he must protect the vessel and crew as well as what she carries in her hold.

The external coercion is more difficult to accept, because it originates from outside the profession's own standards and is perceived as being administered arbitrarily and by those with no loyalty to, or interest in, the work. The scientist depends on grants, the academic depends on tenure, the artist must deal with patrons or his gallery (or publisher or performance company), the politician with angry voters and a hostile press. The athlete must hire agents and the captain must please the ship's owners who determine cargo, destination and how many resources he can employ to maintain his vessel.

Only two professions in our society can hope to escape the supervision of this external coercion: the bureaucrat and the capitalist. Both operate in an environment where there are internal threats but little external regulation--or at least, they would like to keep it that way as much as possible. They accomplish this by creating a work environment where they themselves devise the controls and restrictions, and where they are answerable to no one except those just like themselves. The bureaucrat makes the rules he plays by, or at least others like him do, and the capitalist creates and controls capital, the element in commerce which is comparable to energy in in physics: the ability to make things happen. The former may be involved in his own intrigues with other bureaucrats, the latter must compete against other capitalists in a market, but these are challenges which both have accepted as part of the job. Both are very jealous of attempts by those outside their sphere to insert any regulation or control or oversight into their activities. And of course, each correctly perceives the other as a threat and continuously works to undermine its activities. The bureaucrat uses regulation and government coercion, the capitalist uses money to lobby in the legislature, the courts, and the executive, and propagandizes through the press. He also has the abbility to make campaign contributions, and the cynicism to make them to both sides in a race.

We like to define Liberal and Conservative as the supporters of each side, but this is only true in recent American or Western European experience. In reality, the terms should apply to those who challenge or defend the dominant paradigm. The opponents to Soviet Communism were liberal, and its defenders conservative; and there were times in history when capitalism was a very progressive force, compared to the feudal landowners it was challenging for supremacy. I suspect that if there were ever a socialist revolution in the United States, after everything settled down there would still be liberals and conservatives, and they would probably be the same people.

The irony of this great debate which our society now finds itself in is that there is little difference between the capitalist and the bureaucrat. Even the term "government bureaucrat" is deliberately misleading, anyone who has worked for a large corporation knows that there is always an enormous bureaucracy in place, which operates precisely as any other bureaucracy, with little oversight from market mechanisms. The corporate bureaucrat is primarly vulnerable to bureaucratic threats, and the survival of the corporate bureaucracy rarely has any connection to its profitability. Only when it becomes completely corrupt does it collapse from its own inefficiency. But since the bureaucracy tends to define the criteria for success and effectiveness, it is not likely that it is going to declare itself dissolved simply for not doing its job efficiently. It can only be toppled from outside.

There is a huge grey zone between government and business, inhabited by strange hybrid creatures called institutes, think tanks, associations , federations, commissions, bureaus etc, which are intimately connected to both. And parts of both government and business only exist because of the other. The contractual relationships that exist between the two further cement these ties and relationships. Employees of government and industry hop back and forth across these boundaries effortlessly, and careers are built on the ability to do so. It is becoming harder to advance in either sector without having experience and friends in the other, and this fantasy we have of a great company led by a capitalist visionary is just that. Modern corporations are large bureaucracies, with no owners and led by professional career bureaucrats. I remember I once asked a mathematician at the oil company where I worked (he had emigrated from a similar job in the USSR several years earlier) how different his working conditions were in the US than in Soviet Union. His answer: "There is no essential difference. I came for the freedom and the money."

It goes without saying that there are enormous and fundamental practical and philosophical differences between public and private bureaucracies, but the inhabitants of these two planets, whether leadership or worker bee, are strangely similar.