Misconceived Quests

     God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
     Courage to change the things I can,
     And wisdom to know the difference.

     [Reinhold Niebuhr]

     The plea above is as well known among Americans as any invocation of God’s favor other than the Lord’s Prayer. It expresses not merely a desire but an important fact about reality: a vanishingly small fraction of it is susceptible to anyone’s manipulation.

     Individuals associate for a common purpose under an assumption that by doing so, they’ll become able to change certain aspects of their circumstances that no one of them could change alone. And indeed, for some such purposes – e.g., a well-conceived business venture – this is possible. However, even the largest imaginable collective cannot alter the laws of Nature. That includes human nature.

     This precept becomes especially important during a political campaign.

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     The emergence, during the Sixties and Seventies, of the school of analysis commonly called Public Choice economics was one of the most important intellectual developments of the Twentieth Century. At long last, serious intellectual firepower, in the form of Mancur Olson, James Buchanan, and Gordon Tullock, was brought to bear on a critical question: why supposedly representative governments behave as they do even when in stark contradiction of the expressed will of the electorate.

     At the heart of the analysis lay an aspect of human nature well known and well understood since well before Adam Smith: An individual’s interests motivate him more powerfully than the interests of any group. Therefore, individuals will act in accordance with their personal interests and in contradiction to their supposed group interests (which includes any “marching orders” they may have been given by the electorate) whenever circumstances enable them to do so. As a corollary, individuals will seek to shelter within environments where the cost to themselves of pursuing their own interests will be minimized. This will often include environments that allow them to shift the costs of their interests to others’ shoulders.

     The superiority of individual interests over collective interests helps to explain why democratic electoral mechanisms have so little influence over the behavior of bureaucratic governments.

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     In September of 2013, I wrote:

     Never imagine that bureaucracies are under the control of our "elected" executives and legislatures. They are not. Civil Service rules plus the ability to disclaim responsibility immunize them from anyone's displeasure, including presidents. If you doubt this, consider the sentiments of David L. Boren, for some years a United States Senator from Oklahoma:

Boren, formerly a state legislator and governor, went to Washington expecting to make some changes. "What impressed me most is the great power of the bureaucracy compared to that of elected officials. All the talk about growing control by the bureaucracy is not exaggerated. The shift in power is very real.... There is almost a contempt for elected officials."...

Senator Boren found, to his surprise, that a Senator has great difficulty even getting phone calls returned by the "permanent" employees, much less getting responsive answers to his questions.

The voters can't "throw the rascals out" anymore, because the main rascals are not elected but appointed....

Regulatory bureaucrats have extra power because they can outlast the elected officials. "Often," Boren explains, "I've said to a bureaucrat, 'You know this is not the president's policy.'

'True, Senator, but we were here before he came, and we'll be here after he leaves. We're not in sympathy with his policy. We'll study the matter until he leaves.'"

[From Armington and Ellis, MORE: The Rediscovery of American Common Sense.]

Look upon the naked, if anonymous, face of your true master, and be afraid.

     The unnamed bureaucrat in the above citation says “we” and “we’ll,” but in point of fact he’s almost certainly speaking on behalf of a personal interest. It might be his job’s security. It might be his taste for power. It’s most unlikely to be a conception of the “public good.”

     As Senator Boren notes, we can’t throw such rascals out. They’ve contrived protections for themselves, including effective anonymity, that insulate them against such corrective action. The typical bureaucrat sought his post precisely because of those protections. They give him what he most wants for himself. Notions about duty to the public probably don’t impinge on his consciousness, except when it’s necessary to render them lip service (which, for a bureaucrat, isn’t often).

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     The presidential election campaign under way at this time is animated to a large extent by “anti-establishment” feeling. That sentiment is responsible for much of the support enjoyed by both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. It might propel either of them into the Oval Office. But if the voters conceive of the “establishment” in electoral terms alone, their attention is misdirected.

     Elected federal officials number only 540. The federal bureaucracy numbers over five million persons – and with the exception of those of us who are personally acquainted with one or more of them, we don’t know who they are.

     Imagine President Ted Cruz addressing the problem of the federal bureaucracy. What could he do about it within the framework of existing Civil Service law?

• He knows as little about the identities and actual job functions of those bureaucrats as you or I.
• He cannot easily distinguish those who support important priorities (e.g., national defense) from those who don’t.
• The management structure of each bureaucracy exists to maximize its perceived importance to the executive branch, and labors ceaselessly to increase that perception.
• Ambiguities in the laws that authorize and energize those bureaucracies muddy the water still further.

     Though every executive branch bureaucrat serves, in theory, at the pleasure of the president, in practice they are immune from any effective form of discipline. Their numbers and the concentration of their interests on their jobs’ security makes them the most formidable force in America, more powerful even than our million-plus lawyers.

     The only potentially effective weapon President Cruz could wield against a given bureaucracy is a campaign to abolish it – but that would require the cooperation of Congress. Many federal legislators would rise against a president of their own party who would dare to propose such a thing. Congress has almost as much stake in preserving the bureaucracies as do the bureaucrats themselves: the bureaucracies give them insulation from the consequences of their irresponsibility and an enemy against which to provide “constituent services.”

     Do not expect President Whoever to succeed in paring back and weakening the federal bureaucracies, much less in eliminating any of them. Today, no president has the weapons such an undertaking would require. No top-down purge of the bureaucracies is plausible, as much as I wish it were otherwise.

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     In Unintended Consequences, John Ross’s novel about the American gun culture and a somewhat fanciful revolution-from-below in defense of the right to keep and bear arms, the development that ignites that revolution is protagonist Henry Bowman’s acquisition of a computer that contains the names and addresses of a great many agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Without that information, the insurgency Bowman and company initiate against the federal government would not be at all plausible or feasible. The anonymity of America’s true rulers is among their best protections against such a revolution. Knowing where and when they habitually concentrate is a poor substitute.

     However, that having been said, the sort of revolution-from-below Ross envisions is the only sort that’s at all plausibly effective. It would oppose the interests of a large, concentrated, powerfully motivated demographic – in Ross’s novel, American gun owners and shooting-sports enthusiasts – against the bureaucracy that seeks to oppress and destroy it. The concentration of passion upon a single shared interest is essential to such a campaign. Note how much more effective groups such as the National Rifle Association have been than anti-tax groups, whose more diffusely motivated supporters will often disaffiliate from them de facto to support some more personal interest, such as a subsidy or subvention.

     Freedom – the absence of coercion or constraint from individuals’ decisions and actions in all matters that don’t involve aggression or fraud – is a more diffuse, less uniform interest even than defending one’s wealth against the taxman. Which is why, when a well-meaning correspondent speaks of fighting a grassroots revolution against Leviathan in the name of freedom, my immediate reaction is How can he be so sure that enough of those fighting would agree with him on what they’re fighting for?

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     I’m not arguing here for completely absenting oneself from involvement in politics in all things and at all levels, though I would commend him who follows that course out of sincere conviction. I’m merely pointing out the low probability that any political campaign for freedom, whether broadly conceived or for some specific aspect thereof, would attain its overt goal. Too many individuals’ personal interests, and too large a group of persons whose common interest lies in perpetuating the governmental status quo, would militate against it. They who designed our fetters have done too good a job. They’ve harnessed human cupidity and weakness too effectively for men of good will to undo them, even though we are probably a majority.

     If there is a substantial hope for a future of freedom, it lies in our prospects for escaping: not fight but flight. Yet even the most dramatic imaginable flight would offer only a temporary reprieve, for human nature is what it is, and is not to be unmade by anyone’s efforts. It’s simply one of the things we cannot change.

     Be not too trusting in leaders, political or otherwise, who exhort you to march behind their banners in the name of freedom. Even when they’re utterly sincere, their quests are seldom well conceived. Support them judiciously and cautiously, if at all. Sincerity has a way of departing from those to whom power is given...sometimes, more swiftly than we can imagine.