Locating The State

     Brownstone Institute president Jeffrey A. Tucker has produced a wide-ranging, yet notably compact essay that addresses several questions at once:

1. What is the State?
2. Whence does it arise?
3. Who really wields its powers?
4. 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!

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     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.

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     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.

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     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.

Got A Problem?

     Certain things about the workings of government have been well-known “open secrets” for decades. Persons who dare to broach them publicly are usually tacitly ignored by the major media, under the sotto voce rules about what subjects are and are not for open discussion. When a case that gives the game away is accidentally disclosed to public eyes, the foofaurauw can be deafening: both from ordinary Americans’ expressions of outrage and the frantic cries of talking heads attempting to deflect attention from it.

     There are reasons for all this, of course. This morning, Mark “Mad Dog” Sherman cites an article filled with cases of interest:

     Every human decision brings with it unintended consequences. Often, they are inconsequential, even funny. When Airbus, for example, wanted to make its planes quieter to improve the flying experience for travelers, it made its A380 so quiet that passengers could hear, with far too much clarity, what was happening in the plane’s bathrooms. Other times unintended consequences have far-reaching, dramatic effects. The US health care system is a case in point. It emerged in its present form in no small part because of two governmental decisions.

     Please read it all. My surmise is that the government agencies involved in the cases cited at the FEE article were less concerned with the consequences of their decrees than with the immediate public reaction to them. Politicians, after all, are the world’s supreme exponents of the art of claiming credit while averting blame. And being seen to be “doing something” is often what they most desire, especially with an election pending.

     For a darkly humorous yet ultimately grim assessment of this effect and others that flow from it, we have some observations from How Washington Really Works by Charles Peters, editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly:

     The Library of Congress recently studied federal agencies' compliance with the Sunshine Act of 1976, which was supposed to open government to the public. The study found that of a group of 1,003 government meetings listed in the Federal Register, 627 were either partially or completely closed to the public. One closed meeting was held by the Federal Reserve Board to consider the design of its furniture; it was closed on the grounds that "matters of a sensitive financial nature were being considered by the Board."

     The military is a master of this kind of subversion. When the navy was ordered to conserve fuel during the energy crisis of the early seventies, it reported that it had reduced its ships sailing time by 20 percent. What it actually did was redefine sailing time to exclude a ship's journey from the port to the fleet at sea.

     What is this if not make-believe? Laws are passed, orders are given, compliance seems to occur, but nothing changes. Bureaucrats don't like real change, only the appearance of change. That is why they are so fond of reorganization. Reorganization gives them something to do: redrawing charts, knocking down office walls--but nothing outside the agency, such as poverty or hunger or disease, is affected in the slightest. What does happen is that new jobs are created, almost always with higher grade classifications, which of course means higher salaries for the reorganizers.

     The reason bureaucrats like internal reorganization better than external action is easy to understand. Suppose you work in an antipoverty agency and you do your job so well that poverty is eradicated. Or suppose you work in the Department of Energy and the energy problem disappears. What will happen to you? The bureaucrat can figure that out. If he takes real action, if he's truly effective, he'll be out of work--he won't survive. If, on the other hand, his action is make-believe, poverty will not disappear, the energy problem will not be solved, and his job will be safe--he will survive. Now you understand the fundamental Washington equation:

Make-believe = Survival

     Truer words were never written. And know this: Peters considers himself a liberal. He sincerely believes that government can solve problems.

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     The late Cyril Northcote Parkinson – yes, he of the famous Law — was ahead of the curve on the consistent internal dynamics of all bureaucracies:

     [W]e must picture a civil servant, called A, who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial, but we should observe, in passing, that A’s sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy: a normal symptom of middle age. For this real or imaginary overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies. He may resign; he may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B; he may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D. there is probably no instance, however in history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W’s vacancy when W, at long last, retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both. [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     There’s an “of course!” feeling to this passage. It’s what bureaucrats do and have always done. But wait: why doesn’t A ever settle for one subordinate? Parkinson is ready with the explanation:

     It is essential to realise at this point that C and D are, as it were, inseparable. To appoint C alone would have been impossible. Why? Because C, if by himself, would divide the work with A and so assume almost the equal status that has been refused in the first instance to B; the status the more emphasised if C is A’s only possible successor. Subordinates must thus number two or more, each being thus kept in fear of the other’s promotion.

     And from there the dynamic extends itself:

     When C complains in turn of being overworked (as he certainly will) A will, with the concurrence of C, advise the appointment of two assistants to help C. But he can then avert internal friction only by advising the appointment of two more assistants to help D, whose position is much the same. With this recruitment of E, F, G, and H the promotion of A is now practically certain.

     Magnificent. An analysis for the ages, worthy of intellectual immortality. Yet virtually everyone with a public voice who deigned to notice it, early on, chortled and said, “Yes, very droll, but he’s not really serious, is he?”

     Parkinson was quite serious – and irrefutably correct.

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     Add Parkinson to Peters and you have a steel-engraving depiction of the dynamics of government bureaucracies, especially those whose hirelings are protected from discipline from above or adverse feedback from the public. The only solution is the complete elimination of such a bureaucracy and the renunciation of its mission as an appropriate task for government. If the latter step is impossible for some reason – e.g., the five armed forces depend on the procurement bureaucracy that takes up the greater part of the Department of Defense; we can’t have those grubby soldiers, sailors, and airmen specifying and negotiating for their own gear and weapons, can we? – then however thorough the cleanout of “deadwood” bureaucrats, the dynamic will reassert itself among the “saplings” that replace them.

     And of course, the “problems” assigned to these bureaucracies will remain “unsolved.” You don’t expect bureaucrats to work to put themselves out of business, do you?

Quickies: There’s Stupid, There’s Seriously Disturbed, And Then...

     ...there’s Lucianne Walkowicz:

     NASA official Lucianne Walkowicz is disturbed by “the way people talk about going to Mars as if the planet is ours… When we talk about terraforming, that’s a planetary-scale strip mining operation.”

     “It’s been troubling to me to hear people erasing what’s going on here on our own planet both from an environmental standpoint and an indigenous rights standpoint when they talk about going to other planets,” she fretted out loud.

     Mars is not populated and there are no indigenous people there. We aren’t colonizing by taking away a thing from anyone. She brings up indigenous people as if it matters in any way at all.

     We aren’t even at the point of developing a planet and she wants to limit it to be inclusive.

     This woman probably leaves her house and crosses streets without a minder. Surely she should have been put in the care of a responsible adult some time ago...but instead, she holds a federal post: NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology. You can’t make this stuff up.

The Snores Are In The Details

     I know how to concentrate. I know that concentration is the key to comprehension, especially when the subject is riddled with byways. I know how to isolate the distractions and wall them off. And I’ve tried, as manfully as I know how, to stay awake over the doings of, and connections among, the Deep State players in the anti-Trump forces slowly being unearthed. I can’t do it.

     The Conservative Treehouse / Last Refuge has done valiant work at following this slowly developing story. Other sites have contributed as well. But how many people are paying attention? And what’s likely to follow the conclusion of the investigation?

     I’d imagine that most Americans have tuned out by now. The operation is too broadly distributed. There are too many dots to be connected. No one involved in the scheme lacks some prospect of exculpation. Perhaps worst of all, despite the dogged efforts of those who are slowly assembling the story, it’s unlikely that any of them will ever be sent up the river.

     Even keeping all the names straight has become impossible. Forget about keeping it all in sequence. Who did what to whom, and on what date? Who got paid, and where did the money come from? Were higher-ups involved? Were they “higher up” at the time, or did their elevations come afterward?

     You can conceal anything from others’ eyes, yet keep it nominally “in the open,” by scattering its components among a sufficient number of collaborators.

     This is the “Deep” aspect of the Deep State: its web of innumerable bureaudrones, widely scattered and deeply deployed in the bowels of the “permanent government.” It’s the most frustrating – to an investigator – variety of operational security: the operation was buried in so many details, each one seemingly inconsequential until it’s connected to the rest, that most Americans will fall asleep before the whole picture can be seen and judged.

     And it is among the best arguments I know for the complete elimination of the federal bureaucracy.

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     My admiration for Co-Contributor Linda Fox knows no bounds. She too has done her best to follow the interweaving of the threads...and it’s worn her down. Perversely, that makes me feel a trifle better. Not a lot, but some: the sort of “better” that comes of knowing that one is not alone.

     The thesis of the burn-it-down / start-from-scratch camp has much to recommend it. How else does one untangle a Gordian knot? How else does one clear a square mile thicket of poisoned thorns? What other course would, after completion, leave a patriot feeling that life is worth living?

     I keep looking for that planetoid, and it stubbornly refuses to appear.

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     The common wish for a champion, an Alexander who can and will slice all the way through the tangles the Deep State has wound around us, is the reason for the elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency. Certainly no one nurtured by the political Establishment would have sufficed. Neither would anyone soft-spoken enough to be regarded by the “better sort” as harmless, easily defeasible. We needed a brawler, and whether or not we were conscious of the need, that’s what we elected.

     Trouble is, the Deep State, like any other colony organism, has a will to survive. From the instant Trump passed 270 electoral college votes, they who hold its tiller went to work on their plan for nullifying his presidency. Today, a little short of two years from that event, they’re still at it, even as dedicated sleuths strive to puzzle out each of the threads in their web.

     Yes, the Deep State has the support of many whose names we do know. Yes, should the webs woven around President Trump cause him to stagger and fall, they will applaud and tell us that “we told you so.” And yes, there’s nothing the political Establishment would like better than for the whole thing to blow over, so that we can return to the nice, quiet, utterly manageable status quo ante.

     But the operators that matter aren’t the ones whose names we know. Granted that the NeverTrumpers with bylines and talking-head gigs will benefit should the collaborators succeed. Still, the thrust of the thing isn’t to confer a benefit upon any particular person or group, but to keep the structure intact:

     Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of O’Brien’s face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O’Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.
     ‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?’

     The structure is the enemy.

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     Some time ago, I wrote:

     Whose decisions about you and yours are essentially unchallengeable? That is: what category of persons can override your preferences about your life, liberty, and property, and be practically certain of having the last word and not facing any cost nor penalty for having done so?

     Sorry! No credit for any answer but "government bureaucrats." All other arrogant and overbearing life forms are subject to some form of correction, discipline, or reprisal. The bureaucrat -- the faceless source of innumerable rules and decisions, most of which are made in secret and without either Constitutional or statutory foundation -- is so well insulated from our wrath that he can almost never be identified and can never be fired, no matter how extreme his abuses.

     Without the bureaucracies, this would still be a largely free country, de facto if not de jure.

     And in another essay:

     Bureaucracies are what they are -- faceless instruments of coercion beyond redress by any lawful mechanism -- by design. They function as they do because their scam serves both the interests of the political class, the interests of the bureaucrats themselves, and the interests of the many nominally private institutions that profit from the existence and function of the bureaucracy. Consider as a trivial example the symbiosis between the Internal Revenue Service and the legions of tax lawyers, tax accountants, and tax return preparation specialists; were the IRS to fall, it would drive some 200,000 of those parasites into penury.

     The most useful analogy available is that of an organism that has optimized itself for a particular habitat. A habitat is ideal for some organism because it copiously provides what the organism needs while disadvantaging any species inclined to prey upon it.

     Five years ago, when I wrote those essays, I hadn’t yet grasped the implications of my own reasoning. Today I think I do. What about you, Gentle Reader?

Monocultures: An Observation

     I’m sure my Gentle Readers have heard quite enough about the lockstep liberalism of the major media, the dumbed-down puree that emerges from our schools and universities, and the brown-goo culture that dominates every one of the federal bureaucracies. These are well known monocultures: places where a single strain of convictions has succeeded in marginalizing (in some cases totally driving out) every other variety of belief or thought. In each case the dominant strain has also erected high, thick barriers against re-penetration by competing beliefs and agendas. The conquered turf seems impermeable by anything that might threaten its monopoly.

     But there is nothing without a weakness – and a monoculture, when its weakness is targeted by an adequately efficient competitor, tends to decay and collapse with startling swiftness.

     The American Right has fussed over the media, educational, and bureaucratic monocultures for decades without being able to do anything much about them. Some chinks appeared in their protections – homeschooling, online education, talk radio, the Internet – but the competitors have proved insufficiently efficient to bring down their opponents. Indeed, the defenders of the educational and media monocultures have succeeded somewhat in counter-infiltrating the competitors and weakening them before they could pose a significant threat. As for the bureaucratic monoculture, nothing has seriously threatened it.

     Until now.

     A monoculture’s defense mechanism is almost always a “grass roots” phenomenon. The “bottom-level” organisms deny invaders access to light, space, and nutrients through their sheer mass and solidity, preventing any incursion from making progress. Thus, the attacker has a logistical problem that can prove impossible to solve.

     In the case of the federal bureaucracies, the Right’s hopes have always been pinned on the election of conservative presidents who would direct their political appointees to reduce the ranks of the bureaucrats who nominally report to them. That approach ran full tilt into Civil Service job protections, the power of the public-employee unions, and the bureaucrats’ ability to infect the political appointees with a contrary agenda. In the usual case, the political appointees became as immovable in defense of “their” departments as the lowest-level bureaucrats therein. Presidents have discovered, to their sorrow, that such a “top-down” approach to thinning the bureaucracies were doomed from the start.

     Recently, President Trump took a different approach: he attacked the defense mechanisms themselves. He’s just simplified and eased the procedure for terminating a Civil Service employee, while federal court decisions have ruled against compulsory unionization and dues collection by withholding. The former move makes it possible both for political appointees to fire those under them who fail to cooperate; the latter creates inroads and protections for entrants not in sympathy with the monoculture, giving the appointees beachheads of support beneath them.

     However successful it might ultimately prove, it will take time for President Trump’s approach to reap results. Even so, the change in direction is a promising one. The increasingly shrill attacks on the Trump Administration from the media, the Democrats, and the rest of the Left suggest that at last they know real fear. Their most important bastion in federal power might finally have met an enemy it cannot easily deflect.

     We can hope.

“Deep State”

     I keep citing this passage, yet it seems that few are paying attention:

[United States Senator from Oklahoma David L.] 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.]

     When Monmouth University polled private citizens about the “deep state,” only a minority (37%) were both familiar with the term and professed to be against the phenomenon it labels. Yet the matter is not so simple:

     Few Americans (13%) are very familiar with the term “Deep State;” another 24% are somewhat familiar, while 63% say they are not familiar with this term. However, when the term is described as a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy, nearly 3-in-4 (74%) say they believe this type of apparatus exists in Washington. This includes 27% who say it definitely exists and 47% who say it probably exists. Only 1-in-5 say it does not exist (16% probably not and 5% definitely not). Belief in the probable existence of a Deep State comes from more than 7-in-10 Americans in each partisan group, although Republicans (31%) and independents (33%) are somewhat more likely than Democrats (19%) to say that the Deep State definitely exists....

     The Monmouth University Poll was sponsored and conducted by the Monmouth University Polling Institute from March 2 to 5, 2018 with a national random sample of 803 adults age 18 and older, in English. This includes 400 contacted by a live interviewer on a landline telephone and 403 contacted by a live interviewer on a cell phone. Telephone numbers were selected through random digit dialing and landline respondents were selected with a modified Troldahl-Carter youngest adult household screen. Monmouth is responsible for all aspects of the survey design, data weighting and analysis. Final sample is weighted for region, age, education, gender and race based on US Census information. Data collection support provided by Braun Research (field) and SSI (RDD sample). For results based on this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling has a maximum margin of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points (unadjusted for sample design).

     To me, the survey’s sampling method appears sound, and its questions well designed to minimize surveyor influence on the answers. But don’t take my word for it. Read the linked article and draw your own conclusions.

     If there is a body of persons who, individually or in aggregate, exercise more power than the elected officials of the federal government, we would be justified in pointing to them and saying “There is the true federal government. There is the ‘deep state.’” If we take Senator Boren’s comment on his dealings with the federal bureaucracy as sincere and at face value, and if the 75% of respondents to the Monmouth poll who believe there is such a body are correct in their surmise, we have a problem that goes well beyond anything we could correct by electoral means. But there’s that word if again. Is it so?

     Certainly, conditions are ripe for the emergence of such a body:

1. Federal employees are protected from termination by Civil Service law.
2. Voluntary resignations by federal employees are vanishingly few in number.
3. Many layers of supervisors stand between the bureaucrat and the elected government.
4. A supervisor-bureaucrat who fails to argue consistently for the expansion of his pyramid of subordinates (and, of course, the funding for it) will not survive. This is well known to career bureaucrats.
5. As the funding for the bureaucracy is extracted by force from millions of persons who have no say in the matter, the top-level bureaucrat – e.g., a Cabinet Secretary – will have no qualms about championing the expansive desires of his subordinates. (Remember that by Item 4 above, Cabinet Secretaries also have an interest in expanding their departments and funding.)

     Those are perfect enabling conditions for a “deep state.” They’ve existed for decades. Thus those who:

• Desire authority without responsibility;
• Seek to wield it with their supervisors’ approval;
• Are principally concerned with job security and retirement benefits;

     ...have had a perfect place to gather for at least eighty-five years. Is it plausible that persons of that orientation would not gather under such an umbrella? Isn’t it more likely that such persons would aim for those jobs and pursue them with impassioned ardor? And isn’t it likely, as is the case in union shops nationwide, that when such persons encounter a “maverick” – i.e., one whose schedule of priorities differs greatly from theirs – that they’d do their best to flush him out of their habitat?

     Cyril Northcote Parkinson wasn’t merely right; he was a visionary, a genius.

     Where shall we seek a solution?

Legislative Encystments

     Unfortunately, I have a depressing subject for this morning’s screed. I know, I know: It’s Monday. Most Gentle Readers don’t need any more reasons to be glum. But then, you went to bed yesterday evening knowing Monday was coming, so why didn’t you brace for it?

     Anyway, quite a lot has been written in recent weeks about the war between the fledgling Trump Administration and the Deep State. Conceptions of the Deep State tend to converge on the great importance of the millions of persons in the Executive branch “alphabet agencies.” The tenacity of their hold on their positions is unequaled by any other category of worker, anywhere in the world, owing to Civil Service laws so indulgent that a bureaucrat who’d raped a minor in Times Square at high noon, with reporters from the Times as witnesses, could retain his job, salary, and all other perquisites during three years of hearings before being discharged. Needless to say, the Left has made the colonization and conquest of the bureaucracies a high priority.

     Outrageous. Intolerable. Terrifying and worse. But there’s more to the Deep State than that.

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     The array of unelected federal functionaries has more components than one, of course:

     [T]he legislator gives general orders to his chief of staff, who then sets the others to work composing a bill to that end. Parkinson’s Law kicks in at this point. A staff of twenty or thirty is inherently incapable of writing a short bill. Among other things, each staffer wants the final product to have his fingerprints on it, to prove his importance to his coworkers and to the legislator. The consequence is invariably a bill that runs to dozens if not hundreds of pages, reads as if it had been assembled from a congeries of legal treatises, obsolete encyclopedias, and phone books, and contains almost as many internal contradictions and ambiguities as there are words in it.

     Yet you might think that a federal legislator’s staff, which serves at the legislator’s pleasure and is not covered by the Civil Service laws, would be more likely to exhibit genuine loyalty toward the legislator, his convictions, and his agenda. That turns out not to be the case. Those staffers have far more in common, for both occupational and ideological reasons, with the time-servers in the bureaucracies than with their titular boss.

     Remember Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. This is well supported by recorded history. Moreover, it has some important corollaries:

• A left-wing organization will bend a substantial fraction of its efforts to corrupting other institutions;
• Absent countervailing survival imperatives, left-wing organizations will collaborate on their common agenda items;
• Once an organization becomes left-wing, it will remain unalterably left-wing unless destroyed root and branch.

     Now consider the circumstances of a federal legislator of conservative convictions, newly seated in Congress. Everyone else in the building has a staff of twenty or thirty; therefore he must have one too. Where is it to come from?

• Young lawyers in the private sector;
• Subject-matter experts from universities and think tanks;
• Veterans of government service, largely from the bureaucracies.

     A Congressional staff position is a prestigious job; the holder won’t want to lose it. Therefore, he must serve his boss in a fashion that persuades him, albeit subtly, that the staffer in question is an important pillar of support for his work. His competitors will be his fellow staffers, who share his desire to stand out from the crowd. He will seek allies wherever he might find them...and the bureaucrats in the alphabet agencies will prove only too happy to “help.”

     Remember the outlandish size of the typical Congressional bill. Remember the incentive that drives every staffer to ensure that his fingerprints are on it. Remember that the longer the bill, the less likely is a legislator to read more than a staff-composed precis. And remember how easily words such as “discretion” and phrases such as “reasonable and proper” find their way into such bills.

     The process is automatic; once in motion, it can’t be restrained. The legislator finds himself encysted and directed by the very persons upon whom he’s relied to keep pace with his fellows in Congress. There’s no more at work than the ordinary incentives that pertain to job holders everywhere. Yet it is curiously irresistible.

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     It takes a strength of will most federal legislators don’t possess to resist the above processes effectively. Even most of the strong-willed can be worn down, over time. That’s why there aren’t many long-serving legislators who both talk the conservative talk and walk the walk.

     Popular perception of these mechanisms might be dim and fuzzy, but the image has gained intensity as the United States has slid down the chute of bureaucratic totalitarianism. The “Flight 93” election of Donald Trump can be ascribed in large measure to that perception:

     Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

     Within the Washington Beltway, those who do think that “things can go on with no fundamental change needed” are thick on the ground. Their dominance of the thinking and proposals that reach the floor of Congress are the broadsword in the hand of the Deep State. They cannot be thwarted by any measure short of the wholesale destruction of the bureaucracies and the Congressional staff system.

     Let the late, great Cyril Northcote Parkinson have the last word:

     [This stage] presents us with no opportunity to do anything. The institution is for all practical purposes dead. It can be founded afresh but only with a change of name, a change of site, and an entirely different staff. The temptation, for the economically minded, is to transfer some portion of the original staff to the new institution—in the name, for example, of continuity. Such a transfusion would certainly be fatal, and continuity is the very thing to avoid. No portion of the old and diseased foundation can be regarded as free from infection. No staff, no equipment, no tradition must be removed from the original site. Strict quarantine should be followed by complete disinfection. Infected personnel should be dispatched with a warm testimonial to such rival institutions as are regarded with particular hostility. All equipment and files should be destroyed without hesitation. As for the buildings, the best plan is to insure them heavily and then set them alight. Only when the site is a blackened ruin can we feel certain that the germs of the disease are dead.

     You might think he was kidding. I don’t.

A Quick Thought From CPAC 2017

     No, I wasn’t there. However, I’ve read transcripts of some of the events, and have watched a few videos, and nothing has impressed me more than one lone phrase from a single speaker. Here’s Stacy McCain’s report:

     President Trump is “maniacally focused” on keeping the promises he made to America during his campaign, White House strategist Steve Bannon said Thursday during a panel with chief of staff Reince Priebus. That includes enforcing immigration law — “protecting the sovereignty of the United States,” as Priebus said — and an agenda of deregulation that Bannon called the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

     I added the emphasis.

     The bureacratic / regulatory apparatus of the federal government is the most difficult of its excrescences to cope with. Bureaucrats are largely immune to effective discipline, a privilege your representatives and senators surely wish they could share. Worse, they arrogate all sorts of authority that confounds the typical private citizen, who has no idea if it’s based on actual statute law. And of course, an ever increasing fraction of them goes about armed...some with fully automatic weapons.

     What I’d like to comment on just now is the intimacy between rule-by-bureaucrat and unConstitutional laws. More than 90% of the laws Congress has passed over the century behind us have no Constitutional foundation. Most federal legislators are aware of that, though they’d never publicly admit it. Moreover, many of those laws are so long and so convoluted that no one has ever read them in their entirety. In consequence, no one really knows what they say.

     No legislator would want to be responsible for the implementation or enforcement of such a law. For that, Congress needs an arm it can wield at a distance. The answer that pops out of the slot is the federal bureaucracy.

     This has three major advantages for Congress:

• First, the odium for the enforcement of such laws falls elsewhere than on the legislators who enacted them.
• Second, the bureaucracy provides legislators with a political whipping boy, who can inveigh against abstract “bureaucracy” and provide relief from bureaucratic action as “constituent services.”
• Third, the bureaucracy can be used as a weapon against disliked private citizens, unpopular organizations, and opponents of sitting Congressmen, without directly implicating the Congressmen using it thus.

     This was a “good thing” for a long time, not for private citizens but for legislators and bureaucrats. However, Americans have caught on in record numbers, which is a large part of why Donald Trump has gained the presidency. It’s clear both from Bannon’s statement above and Trump’s own remarks that the new Administration is resolved to do something about it. In that effort I wish President Trump, consigliere Bannon, and the rest of the team every imaginable success.

     I’ll be back later with something meatier.

The vote heard 'round the world

First "Brexit," then Trump. If both our nations pushed back against the Globalists in the same year, that'd be some Hope & Change I could actually believe in!

Emboldenings

     Yes, it’s another Fran Porretto neologism. You won’t find it in the dictionary – at least, not in any dictionary I’m aware of. But the rules of construction should make its meaning clear.

     Boldness – confidence compounded with brassiness – arises from action that repeatedly meets with success, without undue negative consequences. A businessman becomes bold by making one successful innovation after another, without suffering a financial loss. A Lothario becomes bold by seducing one woman after another, without being thrashed by one of her male relatives. A thief becomes bold by pulling off a string of robberies, without getting caught, indicted, tried, convicted, and sent to prison.

     A bureaucracy becomes bold by repeatedly exercising powers and authorities it was never granted, without any of its personnel being hanged from lampposts.

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     One of the fatal errors the American people have made this century past was to permit Congress to delegate its lawmaking power to unelected bureaucrats. This was done under quasi-Constitutional cover, via enabling legislation: laws that:

• Established a justification for government action;
• Created a bureaucracy with subsidiary authority for rule-making;
• Proposed a fiction of “legislative oversight” of the bureaucracy’s rules and actions.

     The essential impossibility of a Congress of a few hundred, many with narrow regional or constituent interests at stake, properly overseeing (and by implication constraining) a bureaucracy of many thousands of persons should have been obvious from the start. Indeed, I would argue at this point that to assume that serious oversight of the resulting bureaucracies was nowhere in Congress’s intentions even when it began to delegate its authority. Whatever the case then, no one can plausibly claim that such oversight and constraint are in force today. Rather, Congress waits for the federal courts to exercise whatever limits the bureaucracies must observe – and in several cases, agencies have proceeded to ignore adverse court rulings in their subsequent behavior.

     It started early in the Twentieth Century, when Progressivism, powered by a widely held, well meant, but inherently wrongheaded meliorist sentiment, was first getting its wheels onto the track. It was greatly aided by the economic distortions the country endured during the two World Wars. Today it constitutes the indispensable method of the federal government for getting what it wants.

     Think about it! The bureaucracies aren’t arms of Congress; they’re parts of the executive branch, that portion of the federal government that enforces federal law. Apart from the bureaucracies, Washington’s enforcement power lies in the armed forces, which, except in case of invasion, operate only outside the United States. Without the bureaucracies, the executive branch would need to depend on the enforcement arms of the state governments to work its will – an aspect of the Constitutional design the Founders fully intended.

     The federal government’s original mission was to supervise the U.S.’s external relations. The seventeen enumerated powers of Congress nearly all point explicitly in that direction. Even the few exceptions, such as the power “to coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and to fix the Standard of Weights and Measures,” looked mainly toward the conduct of America’s foreign dealings.

     Despite the creation of a Department of the Interior and a Department of Justice, there was no contemplated role for the federal government in the lives and activities of private Americans when the nation was founded. Even the collection of federal taxes was in part delegated – subcontracted, if you will — to state-level authorities.

     Quite a throw from today, eh, Gentle Reader?

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     When the first significant bureaucracies emerged during the Wilson Administration, the country was at war. The fury of a nation in arms was directed outward, toward “the Hun.” The absence of scrutiny that resulted allowed Washington to get away with many crimes against the Constitution, including some so shameful that even today most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, would regard them as beyond the pale; look up the life and doings of General Hugh Johnson for a sampling. Yet the citizenry, obsessed with “the war effort,” hardly protested at the intrusions into their lives and affairs.

     Once the seeds of bureaucratic rule were planted, the task of those who sought unbounded power was to keep them well fed and watered. That required occasions for action. The Twenties offered few...but the Great Depression and the resumption of world conflict in 1939 offered multitudes, as the legacies of the New Deal should demonstrate. With every supposed necessity to which they were applied, the bureaucracies grew in extra-Constitutional power. The justifications offered by the courts became ever thinner; Wickard v. Filburn is the most commonly cited example.

     Today the bureaucracies are untouchable, save perhaps by high explosives. Most bureaucrats are permitted to carry firearms; many do so daily, including in states where private citizens are forbidden to do so despite the clear wording of the Second Amendment. Their offices are among the most closely protected of all government buildings. The most intrusive of them labor to keep both the addresses of their offices and the names of their employees secret. Seldom does a bureaucrat face even a mild penalty for anything he might do ex officio.

     And all because we were too consumed by the “world wars” – wars in which, except for the Pacific campaign against Japan after Pearl Harbor, America had no national interest at stake – to pay attention to what was being done to us.

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     The successes of a century have greatly emboldened the bureaucracies. At this point, they seldom even bother to cite their “enabling legislation” as justification for their actions. Consider the recent action against Gibson Guitars, which was in no way an enforcement of American law. Consider the EPA’s attempts to seize control of numerous private properties as “wetlands” or the “habitats of endangered species.” Consider the Bureau of Land Management’s highly publicized seizures and attempted seizures of land in the West – one of which went so far as to mandate a redrawing of state borders.

     Time was, Americans would have risen in a body, rifles in hand, to oppose such arrogance. After a century of citizen passivity, Americans of today are so accustomed to being ruled by unelected bureaucrats that the bureaucrats are convinced that they can get away with anything – and given the relative mildness of the reactions to their recent overreaches, more likely than not they’re correct.

     It’s possible that John Ross had the only workable idea. But every idea requires implementation: someone to “bell the cat.” And We the Sheeple seem incapable of more than talk.

Quickies: The All-Purpose Governmental Excuse

First have a gander at this revealing story about the recent behavior of the Centers for Disease Control:

Top public health officials have collected $25 million in bonuses since 2007, carving out extra pay for themselves in tight federal budgetary times while blaming a lack of money for the Obama administration’s lackluster response to the Ebola outbreak.

U.S. taxpayers gave $6 billion in salaries and $25 million in bonuses to an elite corps of health care specialists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 2007, according to data compiled by American Transparency’s OpenTheBooks.com, an online portal aggregating 1.3 billion lines of federal, state and local spending. The agency’s head count increased by 23 percent during that time, adding manpower and contributing to higher payrolls despite relatively flat funding.

From 2010 to 2013, all federal wages were frozen because of budgetary constraints, but CDC officials found a way to pay themselves through bonuses, overtime, within-grade increases and promotion pay raises....

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins told The Huffington Post last week that the CDC had been working on an Ebola vaccine for more than a decade but was hampered by shrinking budgets.

First, by now we all know that the CDC's budget has been increased each year for the past several years, and we all know about the fatuities the CDC has been spending its budget on. Gun control, global warming, and "bullying" are only the most widely known of them. Second, an agency formed to control the spread of infectious diseases is expected to...well...to control the spread of an infectious disease! In the typeset phrase of the moment, "You had one job." Third...bonuses? For what? What record of achievement justifies the distribution of bonuses among executives who hardly dare to face the public, and when compelled to do so, can't even tell a consistent lie?

A personal vignette: Some years ago I was foolish enough to form a subchapter-S corporation for a purpose that need not concern us today. Within a few weeks I began receiving notices from the State of New York that my quarterly sales tax remissions were late...before I had taken in a single dollar in revenue. So I called the relevant office in Albany to straighten out the matter.

I was put on hold.
I was left on hold for more than thirty minutes.
I concluded there must be a phone problem and decided to try again the next day...which I did.
The next day, I was left on hold for two hours.
But I resolved to wait it out.
And my call was answered.

I was in a fine state of anarchist wrath by then.
I upbraided the bureaucrat for leaving me on hold for so long.
Would you like me to tell you what the very first words out of her mouth were?

"We need more money!"

I'll bet she got a bonus that year, too.

This must stop. But it won't stop itself. Putting Republicans into elective offices won't stop it either. Draw the inference.

A Cudgel Made From The Alphabet

Regular readers will recall the travails of Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the election-integrity group True The Vote, and the multiple harassments she suffered from the various alphabet agencies as her organization became effective. It was a significant display of the use of the "alphabet agencies" to press a person, and an organization the Obamunist Regime regards as antipathetic to its aims. Fortunately, Engelbrecht and True The Vote withstood the pressure successfully, even managing to bring the tactics under the light of public scrutiny in a Congressional hearing. Not everyone who defies the Regime is that fortunate.

And now, courtesy of Mike Hendrix, we may be about to witness a "micro-regime's" use of the very same mechanisms of oppression:

A family in New Jersey has learned it must follow the Common Core curriculum even though the parents have elected to home-school their child.

According to the Home School Legal Defense Association, Margaret Dolanthe, superintendent of Westfield Public School District, sent the family the district’s home-school policy which “required them to submit a letter of intent [to home-school] and an outline of their curriculum which must follow New Jersey Common Core content standards.”

HSLDA senior counsel Scott Woodruff responded on behalf of the family, arguing the state’s home-schooling laws say no such thing.

Dolanthe consequently dropped demands the family follow the policy but did inform the family their curriculum should still be “guided by the New Jersey Common Core State Standards.”

HSLDA’s Woodruff responded by explaining that home-school families have “no duty to follow or be guided by Common Core.”

[Emphasis added by FWP.]

Please ponder the emphasized sentence. "Should," one of my very favorite words, has ominous implications in this context. Its appearance appends an "or else" to the end of Dolanthe's statement. The consequences would most likely be supplied by New Jersey's Child Protective Services department. As Mike notes:

They better brace themselves for repeated no-knock visits from the Child Protective Services SWAT team over the next several years, too. After all, in the United Soviet Socialist States of Amerika, it takes a village, you know.

Unfortunately, such a sequel seems rather more likely than not.

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The regulatory bureaucracies and the IRS have demonstrated by their behavior that they are bound by no law whatsoever, including the Constitution of the United States. They write "regulations" with the force of law, that no statute empowers them to write. They impose penalties -- often quite substantial ones -- on "violators" without a judicial process of any sort. When those they target manage to call them to account in an open court and obtain legal redress, nothing is ever done to the overreaching agency or any of its myrmidons. Most frightening of all, at this point the agencies that have SWAT-like armament and men tasked to use it probably outnumber those that don't.

The very worst of them, of course, are those that, in collusion with the anti-Constitutional "family courts," intrude mercilessly into the affairs of law-abiding families, often separating parents from their children on the flimsiest imaginable rationale. Indeed, it's been said with some justice that upon receiving the first hint that a Child Protective Services bureaucrat has taken notice of his family, the sole responsible course for a parent to follow is to "haul stakes" and vanish, before the minions of the State can arrive to seize his children. Horror stories that substantiate that bit of advice are many; Stephen Baskerville presents a goodly number of them in his landmark book Taken Into Custody.

Yet all the alphabet agencies are complicit in the destruction of Americans' Constitutionally guaranteed rights. They've succeeded in placing themselves above all law and restraint because the political elite wants it that way. It provides legislators with something to campaign on: their provision of "constituent services."

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There are approximately half a million elective positions in the United States at this time, from the federal level all the way down to the school and library boards. Every politician who contends for an elective position wants above all else someone or something he can use as his target: an incompetent or a villain he can position himself against. This is because nearly all politicians would prefer not to have to run on their records; that would invite far too much scrutiny for most of them to bear. They'd rather campaign against some vilifiable enemy, and a faceless bureaucracy that can be castigated for its misdeeds, with promises of "reform" to come, is the ideal variety.

"Constituent service" is an integral element in this strategy. Consider a Congressman to whom some constituent appeals for help with something impeded by a regulatory bureaucracy. If the Congressman can "assist" the constituent past his difficulty -- perhaps by promising to support the agency's quest for expanded funding, or perhaps by threatening the relevant bureaucrats with a federal investigation aimed at them personally -- he can create a loyalist, a potential campaign donor, and possibly an activist who will help him rally others to his side. Such a loyalist is likely to be much more strongly motivated to support the Congressman than are any of his detractors to unseat him. It's basic "Public Choice" economics at work, with the "organizer" being the politician himself.

Add to the above the likelihood that the politician will "triage" such applicants for his assistance, preferring to smile first, if not exclusively, upon the well-heeled and well-connected.

The nation suffers the aggregate consequences. They are inseparable from the existence of the faceless bureaucracy with de facto unbounded powers. But of course, no politician would ever admit to the dynamic before an open microphone. That would give the game away -- and the game is a great part of the reason for the perennial 90%-plus incumbency perpetuation rate in these United States.

If there's a solution short of massive armed insurrection, I can't think what it might be. Nor is even a successful revolution guaranteed to improve matters. Quoth Richard Tawney: "Revolutions, as long and bitter experience reveals, are apt to take their color from the regime they overthrow."

I hope to return to this.