How to Eliminate Deep State Dictatorship

Why “deep state dictatorship”?

Let me start with the notion that most people would call the middle point between capitalism and socialism a “mixed economy,” which they also continue to say is a “mixture of freedom and controls.”

I’ll grant the “mixed economy” part but add also that the middle point is a “mixed society”—of freedom and dictatorship. When initiated coercion is used against citizens, it is a tactic of the dictator to control not just the economy but every citizen’s behavior. The mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.

The more initiated coercion is instituted by a government, the more that country will move toward a totalitarian society.

Capitalism is a social system in which the government remains completely out of our personal and business lives. It requires a complete separation of church and state, and complete separation of business and state. Individual rights, especially property rights, are its supreme values and are inviolate. The only function of government is to protect those rights and the only justified use of force is self-defensive to retaliate against those who have initiated coercion. This means all businesses, including schools and highways, are privately owned and operated.*

The “deep state” is a relatively new term coming to us apparently from Turkey where it means a secretive, extralegal collection of military, bureaucrats, and politicians who seek to undermine and, in some cases, overthrow a government (1, 2). In the United States, the term refers primarily to the unelected federal bureaucracy, currently estimated to be about three million,** and occasionally to collaborators, such as lobbyists at the federal level (about 12,000), assorted think tanks, military leaders, and corrupt politicians, some (many?) of whom would gladly sell their souls to undermine an administration and, perhaps, overthrow it. The national media, who repeatedly print and broadcast leaked classified information and seem unable to use objective methods of reporting facts and truth, must be added as the deep state’s courtiers.

But what is the origin of the bureaucracy and how necessary is it? In the Roman Empire, there was a large bureaucracy built on patronage, appointed by the emperor in power. The form and purpose of our present system, however, stems from the Han Dynasty in China (206 BC – AD 220)—the “Mandarin system”—and came to us by way of Prussia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then, finally, by the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service act in the United States (1, p. 157; 2; 3).

The significance of the Han system is that it established testing to determine who was “qualified” to serve in the government; it is actually a pretense at objectivity and is the system we have today. (See Megan McArdle on “America’s New Mandarins.”) The aim of the Pendleton Act was to eliminate the (unqualified) bureaucrats of the spoils system and give us supposedly highly qualified government workers. The difference between the two systems is that the spoils workers (a very small number in the US) were usually gone when the next president was elected. In modern systems, bureaucrats, which in numbers multiply like rabbits, may and often do spend their entire careers in the nation’s capital, outlasting many presidents.

This is our inheritance from the Progressives of the late nineteenth century (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), the Progressives who were trained in Germany by their democratic socialist professors. The deep state, encroaching more and more on the private sector and our rights, is rapidly moving us toward the giant post office that Lenin envisioned as the socialist state.

The deep state is dictatorial because nearly all of its rules, regulations, and laws are initiated coercion. The message to citizens is always some variation of “you must do this” or “you cannot do that.” These are not rules, regulations, and laws to protect individual rights against initiated coercion. They are themselves the initiation and are therefore dictatorial.***

How do we eliminate the deep state dictatorship? Going back to the spoils system would be a good start. Managing the police, military, or legal system, which is what bureaucratic management properly is (Applying Principles, pp. 31-33), does not require an Ivy League education. Reducing the bureaucracy’s size to a tiny percentage of what it is today and selling all business-like governmental assets, such as the post office and all of the federally owned land (28% of the total acreage in the US) would go a long way toward reducing the national debt.

Drastically reducing the unelected bureaucracy would quickly reduce or eliminate the need for lobbyists and think tanks and might even send away those courtiers in the national media to look for honest jobs where they must actually report news based on facts and truth.

For about 130 years, the Progressives—in the name of  “democracy,” “helping the poor,” and “protecting competition”—have been marching us closer and closer to that “heaven” on earth they call socialism. Their recent behavior indicates either that they are desperate and on the precipice of failure (one can only hope!) or that they see an opportunity to steamroll their ideas on the rest of the country.

Deep state dictatorship must be defeated and removed.


* And are profit-making. I take laissez-faire capitalism to mean that there would also be no nonprofit organizations, as they are creatures of the state, the tax laws in particular. (All nonprofits today, to remain viable, must show an excess of donations over expenditures. Some are highly “profitable.”)

** Add about 16 million state and local employees, including public school teachers.

*** How many rules, regulations, and laws? Estimates, of course, vary, but I would put the minimum around 200,000. (In 2016, there were 3853 regulatory rules and 214 Congressional bills added to the Federal Register.) See my post on the “administrative state” (Applying Principles, pp. 81-83), as Philip Hamburger calls the deep state.