STEIGER'S LAW: "People in a very good structure spend 85% of their time and
energy maintaining the structure and only about 15% working
towards its stated goals."
STEIGER'S COROLLARY: "People within a structure will expend more
time and energy defending it than can economically be spent by people
outside the structure attempting to modify or eliminate it."
Steiger's Corollary, however, only applies to structures that exist on an
income divorced from market forces. Bureaucracies and enterprises
subsidized by government or structures handsomely endowed are the
only structures to which Steiger's Corollary applies. Why? Because,
since their income is assured whether they satisfy their "customers" or not,
it requires concerted active effort to dislodge them. The corollary's use
of the word "defending" confesses the assumption of an active attack.
Where market forces can work, where the invisible hand hasn't been
amputated, the passive power of individuals to just say "No!" renders
Steiger's Corollary no more than an interesting footnote in history, a
special case that applies only to vanishingly small and bureaucratic
segments of humanity.
