Re: In defence of bureaucracy
What bureaucrats most want to do is to do _something_, so there existence appears to have a point. It doesn't really matter what, and it certainly isn't expected to be anything useful. It just should be annoying and inescapable, so that it can't be removed without endless debate about what it should be replaced with. This protects their position.
EU bureaucrats aren't any worse than any others. In fact they're often better than national government bureaucrats because they don't suffer from so many parochial concerns or biases to protect particular nationally-important commercial interests. But they still don't really perform any function except sustaining themselves.