Development of bureaucracy in America

"It is hard to imagine today, but a hundred years ago bureaucracy meant something positive. It connoted a rational, efficient method of organization – something to take the place of the arbitrary exercise of power by authoritarian regimes. Bureaucracy brought the same logic to government work that the assembly line brought to the factory. With the hierarchical authority and functional a specialization, they made possible the efficient undertaking of large complex tasks."

--- From "Reinventing Government : How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector."

This is why I like history and Wikipedia. You can engage in a theoretical debate for a million years without a conclusion. All you have to do is to turn around and do some historical research, which wiki is often the first place you go because it's written for people to read easily, everything becomes just crystal clear.

Now if we look at the history of the development of bureaucracy in U.S. The answer of the question why bureaucracy is necessary for modern government become obvious.

"Spoil system ... derived from the phrase "'to the victor belong the spoils" by New York Senator William L. Marcy.

Similar spoils systems are common in other nations that are struggling to transcend systemic clientage based on tribal organization or other kinship groups and localism in general.
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Jackson supporters had been lavished with promises of positions in return for political support. These promises were honored by an astonishing number of removals after Jackson assumed power. Fully 919 officials were removed from government positions, amounting to near 10 percent of all government postings.
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The hardest hit organization within the federal government proved to be the post office. The post office was the largest department in the federal government, and had even more personnel than the war department. In one year 423 postmasters were deprived of their positions, most with extensive records of good service. The new emphasis on loyalty rather than competence would have a long term negative effect on the efficiency and effectiveness of the federal government.
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Presidents after President Andrew Jackson continued the use of the spoils system to encourage others to vote for them.
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After the assassination of James A. Garfield by a rejected office-seeker in 1881, the calls for civil service reform intensified. The end of the spoils system at the federal level came with the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, which created a bipartisan Civil Service Commission to evaluate job candidates on a nonpartisan merit basis. "

This is the best explanation why corruption and cronyism wide spread in democratic countries like India, Philipine and Latin America, which sometimes called 'failed democracies'. Their failures are rather the result of lacking a civil service, which means "a branch of governmental service in which individuals are employed on the basis of professional merit as proven by competitive examinations", than democracy itself. This would also help to explain east Asian countries' economic success after WWII, but that would worth another post's content.