It's The Law!

Robert Conquest's Three Laws of Politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. 

I made an effort to read Conquest's  The Great Terror: A Reassessment and Reflections on a Ravaged Century, and they were a bit too... dense, I guess, would be the word. The first needed a much deeper knowledge of Soviet history than I have; I kept struggling to remember which commie was which...

Everyone has heard Parkinson's Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

How many have head Parkinson's own corollary, Parkinson's law of triviality:

The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

And, of course, speaking of Parkinsons's law and bureaucracy, we cannot forget Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

UPDATE: This was NOT a post I was expecting a lot of traffic for.  (Well, a lot of hits for this blog...) I just put these here so I could find them when I wanted them, kinda like "Sharing to save" on Facespace.
The question now: Is it a "Wolfe-alanche", or a "Claire-alanche"?