A Nation of Bureaucrats
by William L. Anderson
When flying cross-country recently, I stood in
line like everyone else for the TSA "security"
check and thought about Judge Andrew Napolitano’s
recent book,
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002N2XHVW?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B002N2XHVW&linkCode=xm2&tag=lewrockwell>A
Nation of Sheep. How did Americans, once known
for their independence and fierce devotion to
their rights, become people who easily are
herded, abused, and subjected to regular state-run humiliations?
Perhaps the larger question I should have asked
was this: How did a people in a society once
identified by its rule of law become a people who
now willingly subject themselves to what
essentially is a rule of rules? The answer to me
has become increasingly obvious: the USA, once
known for its swashbuckling entrepreneurs, now
has become a nation of bureaucrats, or, to be
specific, a nation of people who think like bureaucrats.
As for people dutifully standing in line at the
airport, waiting either for what some have called
the "porno scanners" or to receive a "pat down"
that legally can be defined as sexual assault,
the answer is simple. They want to get on the
plane, and they know that for passengers that
resist or refuse to show deference to the TSA
agents barking out orders, the consequences for
them could be serious, the worst being arrested
and charged with "interfering with the duties of
a federal officer," which carries a maximum
penalty of 20 years in federal prison. At the
very least, they will miss their plane, which
will throw all sorts of havoc into their travel plans, costing them dearly.
Like the others shuffling through security, I
just wanted to make my flight, and the distance
to my destination ruled out driving. Any
individual challenge to the abusive state of
affairs I might have wanted to pursue would have
ended badly for me. Of that I am sure. On one
side, federal agents would have been permitted to
kill me had they imagined I posed a threat, and
on the other side, I would have had to pay for my
acts of resistance with my own financial and personal resources.
The creation of this situation has come not only
about because government officials no longer feel
any sense of personal restraint upon their
conduct but also because Americans themselves
have become accustomed and even comfortable to
living within a structure of ever-stifling rules
that can trip them up no matter how hard they try
to obey them. What people in this country once
would have deemed oppressive has become the New Normal.
Roots of Our Non-Resistance
In his 1982 book,
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393301672?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0393301672&linkCode=xm2&tag=lewrockwell>An
American in Leningrad, attorney Logan Robinson
noted that people in the former Soviet Union
could do almost nothing without state
interference. Their lives were forever tied up
with standing in line for bad food, poor consumer
products, and getting documents from the vast
Soviet bureaucracy that would give them
permission to do whatever. Resistance was futile
for them; Robinson noted that even though he
stood up against bureaucrats and argued with
them, that option was not open for average
Russians who did not carry the status of being an American.
Robinson’s friends told him that he had not "left
his American values" at home, and while his
insistence at correct treatment might have
irritated his Soviet hosts, nonetheless they knew
that brutalizing him would create an
international incident that would have spiraled
beyond their control. For the Soviet citizen,
subtle brutality was a way of life and they got
used to it, and the average person living in that
country really could not imagine being treated any other way.
We like to think that it is something about
"communism" and the oppression of those who ran
the political system in the Soviet Union, China,
North Korea, and Cuba that has created the
economic dysfunction that has characterized
communist regimes. Defenders of that system have
claimed that it has been the lack of political
and religious freedoms that has resulted in the
poor economic performances of those countries,
but that "American Exceptionalism," a "religious
belief" which is accepted by both Right and Left
in this country, would enable the U.S. economy to
"work" even if it were to copy the socialistic
aspects of the command economies.
This belief – that Americans had a special
quality that would permit them to make socialism
work – ultimately has turned an entrepreneurial
people into a nation of bureaucrats. Lest one
thinks that a stifling bureaucracy is not in line
with the modern American character, think again.
Political reports that seven of the 10 wealthiest
counties in the USA are contiguous to Washington,
D.C. According to a recent news publication:
Washington, D.C., is now the country’s wealthiest
metro area, replacing Silicon Valley in the top
slot, according to new data from the Census Bureau.
The average household income for residents of the
Washington metro area was $84,523 in 2010, when
the nation’s median household income was $50,046,
Bloomberg reported in an analysis of census data.
These are the bedroom communities for people who
work in Washington in federal bureaucracies or
Washington-related industries, such a military
contractors or other firms that do extensive
business with the federal government. In the past
four years, the U.S. economy has been in the
worst slump in 80 years, yet Washington, D.C.,
and the surrounding area gained in wealth while
the rest of the nation has become poorer, as much
of the wealth gained by Washington and its nearby
residents has been directly or indirectly
confiscated from people who have been employed in
more productive pursuits than serving the bureaucracy.
Unfortunately, the numbers and scope of
productive people are dwindling, and those that
either are employed or supported by bureaucracies
are growing in number. The growth of the power
and reach of American bureaucracies also has
another negative effect: it slowly but surely is
changing the character of what was once the most
entrepreneurial country on the planet into a
place where bureaucracy not only rules, but it also pays and pays very well.
As the U.S. Government over the past century has
expanded its reach, it also has expanded the
bureaucracy needed to enforce the growing number
of government edicts. The natural home for
bureaucracies has been the executive branch,
which is right in line with the ideology of
Progressivism, which has held that an
Administrative State run by "experts" must
replace the messier and less-precise political
economy that has revolved around markets, market
prices, and profits and losses. Indeed, since the
Progressive Era began more than a century ago,
the U.S. Presidency has grown in size and power,
and that growth has come at the expense of the freedom of everyone else.
Besides the economic burdens and the undermining
of Constitutional rights that come with the
fattening of the federal executive branch, the
growing bureaucracy has had another important –
and insidious – effect on how Americans live
their lives: Americans increasingly see economic
and social life as being about obeying rules,
lots of rules. Living under the heavy hand of the
state has become the New Normal in American
political economy, and those that dissent are
finding that bureaucracies have their ways of making people miserable.
In a recent Freedom Daily, James Bovard wrote
about how ordinary citizens are finding their
lives ruined by Environmental Protection Agency
bureaucrats who insist that property owned by
individuals has been classified as a "wetland,"
despite the fact that the normal characteristics
of what one might think is a real "wetland" did
not characterize the land in question. In other
words, the classification was arbitrary, yet EPA
employees enforced the "wetlands" rules with iron
fists, not caring about the consequences to the property owners.
As Bovard noted, some of the landowners were able
to prevail in court while others went to prison
for the "crime" of constructing duck ponds that
federal authorities already had approved. That an
American jury would vote to send someone to
prison for constructing legal duck ponds speaks
volumes about the mentality of people in this country.
Why the readiness to convict, and why the
iron-fisted bureaucracy? Ludwig von Mises in his
classic book,
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1105528804?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1105528804&linkCode=xm2&tag=lewrockwell>Bureaucracy,
explains:
…bureaucracy is imbued with an implacable hatred
of private business and free enterprise. But the
supporters of the system consider precisely this
the most laudable feature of their attitude. Far
from being ashamed of their anti-business
policies, they are proud of them. They aim at
full control of business by the government and
see in every businessman who wants to evade this control a public enemy.
Bureaucracies, writes Mises, exist to implement
and enforce rules, and the more rules, the more
bureaucracy to ensure their enforcement:
Bureaucratic management is management bound to
comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed
by the authority of a superior body. The task of
the bureaucrat is to perform what these rules and
regulations order him to do. His discretion to
act according to his own best conviction is seriously restricted by them.
While that "superior body" consists of the
legislative branches, including Congress and the
various state legislatures, much of the
rule-making actually is done by the bureaucracies
themselves. Before the Progressive Era, the rules
generally were fixed within the body of the laws
written, but as the federal and state governments
began to expand the scope of their powers to
direct and regulate the economy, the apparatus
became unwieldy and the executive branches began
to grab more power in the name of "orderly
transfer." Conversely, the law itself has become
less precise, as legislatures now leave the specifics to the bureaucracies.
For example, during the Great Depression Congress
passed law after law essentially ceding its
lawmaking powers to the Franklin Roosevelt
administration. With laws came new enforcement
agencies, and those agencies were given the power
to write the actual rules which would serve as the interpretation of the laws.
This process only has accelerated. For example,
when the ObamaCare legislation was being debated
in 2010, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared
that the only way to know what was in the bill
was to pass it. Janie B. Cheaney in a column in World Magazine writes:
The 2010 healthcare law is a milestone of
"thingness." Nancy Pelosi's famous dictum that we
must pass the bill in order to find out what's in
it is only partly true: We'll never know its full
potential for mischief. Already it involves over
180 agencies and bureaus, levies 21 new or higher
taxes, requires 16,500 IRS employees, and has
generated 13,000 pages of regulations-so far. The
phrase "the Secretary [of Health and Human
Services] shall determine" appears 1,563 times in
the bill, and what this unelected autocrat shall
determine is limited only by her ambition.
To put it another way, Congress really had little
to do with the law except to set some vague
guidelines into motion which would then be
transformed into rules and policies set by the
various bureaucracies in charge of interpreting
what Congress had said. That this would be an
assault upon the Rule of Law itself brought little, if any, real outrage.
Many of the same conservatives who denounced that
law had no problems voting for the so-called
Patriot Act, which empowered government agencies
to essentially interpret any action that law
enforcement officials did not like as a form of
"terrorism" and to prosecute it as such. The
creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security a year later vastly expanded the
internal spy networks of the U.S. Government,
essentially turning everyone into a "terrorist
suspect" who is forced to "prove" one’s innocence to skeptical bureaucrats.
The upshot of this vast expansion of government
powers in the past century has meant that
individual citizens must receive official
permission from government employees to do just
about anything. People need routine criminal
background checks to be employed in nearly all
occupations today; occupational licensing is a
way of life and anyone who attempts to perform a
job without official permission from someone in a
government office risks not only fines but even imprisonment.
Citizens and Bureaucratic Thinking
When one combines this growth of bureaucratic
power with the tenets of federal criminal law
which easily enable federal prosecutors to
criminalize just about any act, people find
themselves facing prison even though they have
harmed no one. Bovard’s previously-noted account
of the prosecution and conviction of James Wilson
for alleged "destruction of wetlands" is a case in point.
The lands in question had not been classified as
"wetlands" before the arrival of the George H.W.
Bush administration. During his campaign, Bush
said he wanted to be known as the "Environmental
President" and declared that in his
administration there would be "no net loss of wetlands."
Bush and his federal agents were able to engage
in a legal trick to ensure the "no net loss"
promises. First, the Environmental Protection
Agency simply re-interpreted the Clean Water Act
with its prohibition of discharging so-called
pollutants into the "navigable waters of the
United States" into meaning that any water that
fell as rainfall or was in a puddle, however,
temporary, fell into the "navigable waters" category.
The logic was that the water eventually would
migrate into what would be "navigable waters," so
those waters needed to be regulated at their
source, not when they were in channels that
actually could support navigation. Note that
Congress did not change the language of the law
or give the EPA any more powers; the EPA,
operating on a campaign promise from President
Bush, simply changed its interpretation of the
law, and the courts upheld the changes, original
congressional intent notwithstanding.
The second legal trick the EPA pulled was to
change its own rules on classifying wetlands, and
the results were predictable, if not tragic.
Property owners suddenly found their own lands
that hardly fit the description of "wetlands" so
classified, which meant that their own property
rights were strongly restricted. On top of that,
EPA and U.S. Fish and Wildlife bureaucrats
enforced these changes with threats, criminal
prosecutions, and outright brutality, as judges
and juries simply fell into line with what
federal prosecutors demanded, and the media did
its part to denounce these "polluters" and "despoilers of the environment."
As Bovard noted in his article, not even federal
prosecutors argued that Wilson and his
development firm did environmental damage, nor
did they establish any criminal intent. Instead,
prosecutors told jurors that Wilson had broken a
rule – an arbitrary rule at that – and that point
was all that jurors needed to convict. Yes,
American jurors were willing to send one of their
countrymen to prison, a man with no criminal
record or who posed any threat to the public –
because his firm disputed a new rule set down by
the EPA, a rule concocted for political purposes.
If anything speaks of the bureaucratic mindset of
modern Americans, perhaps that verdict does so
best. Likewise, when a Virginia federal jury
convicted pain specialist William Hurwitz in 2006
for prescribing pain narcotics to people who lied
about their pain symptoms – and then sold those
pills on the street for money – jurors
interviewed afterward agreed that Dr. Hurwitz was
no criminal, and they agreed that he did not know
his patients were lying to him.
Instead, one of them told journalists, Dr.
Hurwitz "fell down on the job." American jurors
were willing to destroy the life of a respected
physician and send him to prison because they
believed he did not enforce federal drug laws
with proper zealousness. All of them agreed that
he was no threat to the public, but they
destroyed him anyway because rules are rules.
Americans like to think of themselves as free and
independent people, and perhaps at one time that
was the case. Today, however, Americans find
their lives governed at every level by
bureaucrats in a way that is not much different
than the state of things that existed in the old
U.S.S.R. While one does not have to obtain an
internal visa (as did former Soviet citizens) to
travel cross-country, if one drives, the vehicle
must pass government inspection and one must have
government permission if one is to drive a car at
all. Should one choose to fly, one must not be on
a secret government "No Fly List," and one must
be willing literally to strip naked in front of
Transportation Security Administration
bureaucrats in order to be permitted to board a plane.
As Americans have ceded previous liberties to
bureaucratic control, people have come to believe
that these bureaucracies are necessary for their
very survival. If one speaks of eliminating
government agencies and ending the power that
bureaucrats employed by those agencies have over
American life, the howls of indignation arise and
political cartoonists and editorial writers
denounce the very idea that Americans could live
for even a second without, say the U.S.
Department of Education (which did not exist
until 1979) or the Federal Reserve System. Those
that imply that this country might be better off
without these bureaucracies immediately are
depicted as a threat to the commonweal.
Wrote Mises in 1944:
Today the fashionable philosophy of Statolatry
has obfuscated the issue. The political conflicts
are no longer seen as struggles between groups of
men. They are considered a war between two
principles, the good and the bad. The good is
embodied in the great god State, the
materialization of the eternal idea of morality,
and the bad in the "rugged individualism" of
selfish men. In this antagonism the State is
always right and the individual always wrong. The
State is the representative of the commonweal, of
justice, civilization, and superior wisdom. The
individual is a poor wretch, a vicious fool.
And it gets worse. Recently, the National
Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and
Responses to Terrorism, centered at the
University of Maryland, claimed that people who
seriously questioned the usefulness and
legitimacy of the massive federal bureaucracy and
are "reverent of individual liberty" should be
viewed suspiciously as potential "domestic
terrorists." Not to be outdone, the Missouri
Information Analysis Center in 2009 in a document
given to all police officers in that state
declared that people who have Ron Paul bumper
stickers or call themselves libertarians should
be regarded as "potential domestic terrorists,"
and it even broadened its "potential terrorist"
qualifications to people who own gold.
Then there is the "If You See Something, Say
Something" campaign being pushed by the
Department of Homeland Security. Americans are
told to be eternally suspicious of one another
and not to hesitate to report anything that seems
out of the ordinary. Perhaps it should be noted
that not one authentic "terrorist plot" has been
uncovered by this internal spy program, nor has
it resulted in any kind of increased public safety.
Once upon a time, Americans would have been
utterly distrustful of government attempts to
replicate the former East German Stasi. But once
upon a time, Americans also were wary of a
growing and smothering bureaucracy, and they also
appreciated the good work of entrepreneurs.
Today, bureaucrats are called "heroes" and
entrepreneurs such as James Wilson are met with hostility.
Triumph of the Will of the Bureaucrats
For more than a century, Americans have had one
constant political theme drilled into them: any
expansion of the state is a good thing, and the
only way our society can "progress" is for the
"experts" in the executive branch of government
to be given increasing amounts of power to make
decisions for us. Free and independent people do
not make good bureaucrats, nor do they gladly follow bureaucratic rules.
Over time, however, the propaganda has worked and
Americans also have had to come to terms with the
draconian penalties people must pay for
disobeying arbitrary rules. There also is another
factor at work, and that is the fact that
Americans today are more likely to be working
either in administrative positions or be working
with organizations where administration has been growing.
Take medical care, for example. According to the
Fall 2012 Journal of American Physicians and
Surgeons, in 1971, there were about three
administrators in health care to every four
actual medical practitioners. Today, that ratio
is about 5.1 to 1, with most administrative
growth coming about either to deal with federal
funding or the carrying out of federal mandates.
This explosive growth in medical administration
not only serves to force up overall costs of
health care, but it also has helped to bring
about changes in the way Americans approach bureaucratic management.
What was unacceptable to Americans a few decades
ago has become a "normal" way of life. People
have come to accept state controls that not long
ago would have been unthinkable. When he pushed
for Congress to create Medicare in 1965,
President Lyndon Johnson did not claim that he
was going to unleash vast new bureaucracies. When
he demanded Congress pass the Patriot Act in
2001, President Bush did not say that he was
going to create huge new internal spy networks
that would sweep up innocent people.
Bureaucracies are costly, they draw people away
from entrepreneurial activities, and they also
feed the mentality of state dependency. In hard
economic times such as what we are experiencing
now, people crave security and are willing to
give up even their freedom to have the assurance they will have an income.
Unfortunately, such fear turns Americans against
each other. Not only are Americans told to spy on
each other and to enforce a "rules-first"
mentality, but bureaucracies by nature do not
create wealth and can exist only through plunder,
and when plunder becomes a way of life, the
result is that people are pitted against each
other and the society becomes predatory.
http://lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson349.html
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
