Brownstone Institute president Jeffrey A. Tucker has produced a wide-ranging, yet notably compact essay that addresses several questions at once:
- What is the State?
- Whence does it arise?
- Who really wields its powers?
- Where do we look for its governor?
I use governor above in its original, mechanical sense: a mechanism that limits the action of another mechanism. For those who insist that the State is “a necessary evil,” this is a critical consideration. Those who pursue power most successfully want it for its own sake. It follows that once they have it, they’ll delight in exercising it. But throughout recorded history, there’s always been something that limits such exercises of power. Where shall we look for it?
America’s Founding Fathers believed it to be the consent of the governed. They sought to equip “the governed” with a written Constitution and a guarantee that “the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Their counterparts in the several colonies followed in their train. Thus, the great body of the public would always be capable of reining in the State, and – hopefully – correcting its excesses.
Any fairly observant American will know that it hasn’t worked out quite as the Founders hoped. But owing to our heavily armed populace and our rather firm notions about right and wrong, the State in North America hasn’t succeeded as wildly as have those on other continents. The masters of “our” State – local, state, or federal – are repeatedly thwarted in their aims. Now and then they find that, little though they like it, they must accept reductions in their power and scope. Why?
(Rubs hands together while cackling fiendishly) Heh, heh, heh!
Let’s agree, as a working postulate, that the practical meaning of the State and its power is the use or threat of coercive force. That’s the traditional approach. Who wields that force? Who decides that that force shall be wielded?
Dr. Tucker notes the peculiar locus to which State power and functions have devolved:
Cabinet-level appointees frequently complain in private that they face intractable bureaucracies with all institutional knowledge. They often feel like stand-ins or mannequins. Trump is the unusual president who has even attempted to be in charge. Most are just happy for the emoluments of office and the plaudits that come with it.
In the great majority of cases pertinent to Americans’ common conception of freedom, the decision-makers are bureaucrats: usually faceless souls difficult to locate or identify. This is the great discovery of power-seekers throughout the First World: if the decision-maker is essentially anonymous, he can get away with a lot more. Therefore, political power is least constrained when its wielders are not known to those they rule.
The seeker of public office is seldom fully aware of this relocation of the political power. He usually puts himself forward in the belief that he can “get things done.” The discovery that the opposite is the case has frustrated and angered many a President and Congressman. Quoth (yet again) retired United States Senator for Oklahoma David L. Boren:
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.]
As I wrote in this piece: Look upon the naked, if anonymous, face of your true master, and be afraid.
Dr. Tucker surveys the various approaches to the genesis and development of the state put forward by the great thinkers of the past three millennia. This is good material to be conversant with. It stimulates thought about political path dependency, which is one of the least well addressed of all subjects that touch upon the emergence of the State.
The path by which the State emerges among men is specific to those men: i.e., to their existing social arrangements and institutions before power-seekers start to swell among them. Those things also condition the form of the State, both immediately and further on. The divergences among the theses of such as Hobbes, Hume, Locke, and the rest point to that without making the larger and more nebulous patterns explicit.
When your society is armed and generally freedom-minded, the critical need of the State is to deny potential rebels a clear target. Bureaucracy satisfies that need. But all things have their downsides; this is as true of bureaucracy as of any other mechanism for wielding power. Bureaucracy’s downside is that it’s made up of people who generally share the desires and convictions of those they rule. Thus, they are partially inhibited by those common convictions, especially if one of them is the “mind your own business” ethic that characterizes the great mass of Americans.
That brings us full circle to the “popular consensus / consent of the governed” element in the political dynamic. Thomas Jefferson explicitly stated this basis for a legitimate State in the Declaration of Independence. However, he was thinking of traditionally overt governments: visible, identifiable decision-makers who could therefore be targeted by a populace in insurrection. Yet he identified the forebears of the bureaucracy in these United States:
At home, fellow citizens, you best know whether we have done well or ill. The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property. If among these taxes some minor ones fell which had not been inconvenient, it was because their amount would not have paid the officers who collected them, and because, if they had any merit, the state authorities might adopt them, instead of others less approved. [Second Inaugural Address, 1805
Even so the bureaucracy is upon us. It took time – roughly 150 years from the founding of the Republic before it began to expand in earnest – but it’s upon us nevertheless.
Many commentators have suggested remedies. Some have been tried. All have failed. Even famously freedom-minded Ronald Reagan allowed the bureaucracy to expand. President Trump is bearing down on the effort to corral it, but it’s unclear, given current Civil Service law, that he can achieve more than Reagan did.
If we omit the possibility of a true anarcho-capitalist revolution – I do try to be realistic, but I can’t help but hope! – in the near term, whatever restraint of the State there may be, in all its 88,000-plus instantiations, will arise from the consciences of those who staff it and their cultural commonalities with us private citizens. That and only that will impose any curbs on bureaucrats’ exercises of power over us. Not that the alphabet-dwellers will ever renounce any fragment of their essentially unbounded power! Our hope is not for freedom de jure but freedom de facto.
Elections and who wins them won’t matter nearly as much.
