OUR COSTLY FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

The Tyranny of Experts

When Congress convenes to pass a budget (or more typically, a continuing resolution), the size of our federal budget comes into view.  Most people can’t even imagine the numbers involved.  Let’s look at a physical representation of $1BB.  If you printed it out in $100 bills, it would weigh more than 10 tons and, if stacked, it would be over 3600 feet high (taller than any building on Earth).  Our Fed spends trillions!  It’s impossible to conceive.

But how did the federal government employment numbers grow so high, driving a lot of the costs?  How did our federal government grow past the tight limits set by the Constitution?  Originally, there was NO provision for any people to be paid beyond those elected, or in the judiciary, appointed.  Until the late 19^th C, every president hired his own staff.  The employees knew it would be four years or maybe eight, but not a permanent placement.

The Advent of Civil Service

Surprisingly (at least to me), it was primarily technological advancements, beginning in the 1870’s that made people think that a permanent civil service made sense, allowing us to bring the expertise and knowledge needed to the government, who might find they needed to understand such things.  This seemed to make sense.

However, echoing the way Lenin pitched communism to the people, technocracy meant a belief that the right experts given resources and power could manage society better than America’s supposed anarchy rising from our freedoms.  Of course, those experts believed completely in this vision, now termed “the smart people in the room,” a phrase you may have heard bandied about, particularly by the Clintons.  This concept is almost religious in its nature and underpins everything we think of as progressivism.  And it’s not new.

Woodrow Wilson’s America

Winning by default when the opposition split between two candidates, he wasn’t all that popular when he won in 1912.  But he gave away his beliefs in his book “New Freedom,” which described his vision as anything but. 

“We used to say that the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with except when he interfered with someone else; and that the best government was the government that did as little governing as possible.  That was the idea that obtained in Jefferson’s time.  But we are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with old conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions under which we may live, the conditions which will make it more tolerable for us to live.”

He went on to say that “Human freedom consists of perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.”  These perfect adjustments would be made by “the smart people in the room,” who were never elected.  As such, he created the income tax, the Federal Reserve and changed the Senate to one elected, not appointed by the states. 

In doing so, he unleashed a tide of permanent employment in the administrative state, which only grows with each cycle.  Each area was supposed to represent the best and the brightest, but only as determined by elected officials (not the best and the brightest).  Over time, Congress ceded more and more power to the administrative state, resulting in flurries of regulation adding cost and complexity to doing business and obliterating freedom.  These experts are given power and the resources to constrain our freedom.   Wouldn’t we be better without most of them?  It is a new despotism over which we, the people, have no control.

Covid as Example

Nothing can illustrate the point better than the elevation of Anthony Fauci to an oracle, a sacred figure whose judgment couldn’t be questioned.  He was the “smart person in the room” on Covid, and we found ourselves distanced, triple-masked and under control by the opinion of one man.  How did that work out?  Now, he admits that masks never worked, the 6 ft “social distancing” (what’s social about it) was BS and he didn’t even know how it started.  We’re reaping the damage he caused but the precedent St. Fauci set is even more alarming.

Oh, and of course it was a lab leak, whether deliberate or not.  He knew that in the beginning and lied to us, protecting China and the CCP from where all largesse comes to compliant government workers.

We need to restore our freedoms and do a major purge of the federal government, starting with the Dept. of Education, which does nothing to help anyone learn, and go on from there.  The Citizens Against Government Waste has a lot of useful research to help us know what to cut first.

As adults, we may make stupid mistakes and pay for them, but we don’t need the nanny government we have now.  Instead, let’s look toward a better guiding principle for personal governance.  “Don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.”