Dictatorship by the Administrative State

In an earlier post, I wrote the following:

Bureaucracy encourages a legalistic, rule-bound mentality. It says, in effect, you can only do what has been codified. This leads to the generation of hundreds of thousands of rules and laws to control behavior, coupled with the impossible-to-follow proviso that ignorance of the law is no defense. This is why the bureaucratic state has become the modern form of dictatorship, a system of excessive law (Applying Principles, p. 328; see also, pp. 117-21).

Bureaucracy and administrative state are essentially the same thing. Bureaucrats are unelected administrators and policy makers who run the various governmental bureaus—about 432 in the United States to be exact. (Another, more recent term to disparagingly describe these bureaus is “deep state,” though it is broader including think tanks, military leaders, and the national media.)*
 
In contrast to the administrative state, as I continue in the above earlier post:

A truly free society . . . says you can do whatever has not been codified, i.e., you can do whatever you choose provided you do not violate the rights of others. Rules and laws are few and they are abstract principles. Communication, persuasion, and appeals to inner values become the primary means of relating to others.

And according to defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, criminal law during the early days of this country was simple enough to be read and understood while running!
 
What we have discovered in recent years, however, is that excessive law, vague and overly broad law, and complicated law that cannot be “read and understood while running” are not the only obstacles to a truly free society.
 
Many top bureaucrats in the administrative state are highly partisan, and in some cases, power-mongers who have little respect for their duties as administrators and policy makers, often following the progressive mantra of  “logic, consistency, and truth be damned.”
 
In our American bureaucracy, to administrate means to execute or implement the policies of the sitting president. As policy makers, the obligations of the various bureaus are to make recommendations to the current administration. Nothing in the job description says that bureaucrats may refuse to comply with the Executive’s orders.
 
“Refusal,” however, is the least of what occurred in our previous presidential administration.
 
James Sherk, domestic policy advisor to the President Trump, states that there are about 4000 “at will” political appointees in the bureaucracy, but a total of 2.2 million—essentially tenured—bureaucrats, because it is nearly impossible to fire them. The “at will” appointees, in contrast, can be fired by the Executive. Delegation of work to be done is usually handed down to those senior, unfireable bureaucrats.**
 
It is the higher echelons of this semi-permanent deep state that are the ones who can cause problems for a sitting president. For example, Sherk summarizes what such career bureaucrats have often been guilty of:

• Withholding information;
 
• Refusing to implement policies;
 
• Intentionally delaying or slow-walking priorities;
 
• Deliberately underperforming;
 
• Leaking to Congress and the media; and
 
• Outright insubordination.

Among the worst of bureaucratic subterfuge and insubordination were the self-appointed dictators of public health who led the charge to establish, and continue to rule over, the past two years of covid totalitarianism. Refusal to listen to, implement policies for, or cooperate with the sitting president was worse than palpable. Deception, manipulation, and glaring incompetence due to lack of medical qualification are now being bragged about in post-covid books (see analytical reviews by Lerman and Tucker).
 
Not reading the science or respecting the judgments of such people as Dr. Scott Atlas was typical. Atlas, for example, would walk into meetings of the coronavirus task force with arms full of recently read and analyzed scientific studies—only to be greeted with blank stares and sometimes explicit statements that said, “We don’t care about that.”
 
And Dr. Paul Alexander reports that the bureaucrats he dealt with told him that neither he nor the President had any power, which meant he should toe the line of the deep state or resign. When he was threatened to have his career destroyed—initially, the bureaucrats at Health and Human Services, who hired him, refused to pay him—he resigned.
 
To counter the disingenuousness of these career bureaucrats, Sherk spearheaded the development of executive order Schedule F, signed into law a couple of weeks before the 2020 election, but rescinded almost immediately by the incoming administration. The order focused on making it easier to remove ill performing or insubordinate career bureaucrats. Sherk comments: when the deep state caught wind of the order, “it lit their hair on fire.” Hence, the immediate cancellation.
 
The source of the growing bureaucracy began with the Pendleton Act of 1883 that eliminated the “spoils” (crony) system, though the difficulty of firing bureaucrats did not begin in earnest until the 1940s.
 
The solution to getting rid of this approach to dictatorship is to start closing down government agencies. As columnist Jeffrey Tucker said, talking about the US Department of Education:

Pull the plug on the whole thing and sell the real estate. . . . New CEOs do it all the time. They shut down whole divisions, let go thousands of employees, end relationships with suppliers, sell off properties, and do anything possible to save the company. They do it in order to survive. The company in this case is the United States and it too needs saving.

Send the bureaucrats packing to find honest jobs in the marketplace where their primary task is to satisfy paying customers. Most have likely never held such a job. They have no clue what working in business is really like.
 
Once accomplished, the government may then get back to its constitutional function of protecting individual rights—rather than violating them.
 
 
* Regulatory agencies in particular are unconstitutional because they combine the executive, legislative, and judicial into one governmental organization, violating the separation of powers. The progressive supreme court of the 1920s and ‘30s disagreed, allowing the alphabet soup of agencies to grow seemingly exponentially (see Philip Hamburger, The Administrative Threat; also Applying Principles, pp. 81-83; and here).
 
** The bureaucratic process of trying to fire someone allows for a variety of appeals, requests for reconsideration, and, ultimately, arbitration, which after several months or years often ends in declaring it unjust to fire the employee. Not unlike the academic world.

All It Takes Is Guts

A president from the American past stated this about his previous four years:

During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare.

No, this is not a statement of our most recent former president. The words are from Thomas Jefferson’s second inaugural on March 4, 1805, in which Jefferson endorses and praises the American experiment in a free press. He continues:

The experiment is noted, to prove that, since truth and reason have maintained their ground against false opinions in league with false facts, the press, confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint; the public judgment will correct false reasonings and opinions, on a full hearing of all parties; and no other definite line can be drawn between the inestimable liberty of the press and its demoralizing licentiousness. If there be still improprieties which this rule would not restrain, its supplement must be sought in the censorship of public opinion.

“Censorship of public opinion,” does not mean government censorship. As Jefferson clarifies, it means “punishment in the public indignation.” He continues, “Truth and reason” will prevail, as “facts are piercing through the veil drawn over them.”

Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, so he trusted all voters to exercise their reasoning capacity to speak up against the falsehoods of a “licentious” press. Do voters today do so? And will they in the future?

Edmund Burke, another man of the Enlightenment, supposedly said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” These words, though, do not appear in his writings. Ayn Rand, however, did write that evil is impotent and succeeds only from the sanction of its victims, that is, the victims’ willingness, due to ignorance or choice, to suffer silently, for example, through today’s covid totalitarianism.

Our culture’s intelligentsia, which includes the corrupt press, has eagerly promoted, and continues to promote, this total control of our personal and professional lives.

The solution, as it is with any bully, is to stand up to the communist-fascist left that is attempting to destroy civilization. “Stand up” means to speak out and write against the Goebbelsian propaganda (1, 2), to name names and never back down, especially if and when the “cancel culture” comes after you. This means, as I wrote in a previous post, no compromise of principle, no collaboration with the left, no concessions to them.

“All it takes is guts,” said Walter Williams in the title of his 1987 book of newspaper columns. “I have no shame in admitting my uncompromising bias for the sanctity of personal freedom,” he said in his preface, “and freely admit that as economist qua columnist I try to sell Americans on the moral superiority of individual freedom” (second emphasis added).

Conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh displayed a similar intestinal fortitude with many courageous examples of standing up to the cancel crowd. Normally, Rush ignored whatever the intelligentsia, especially the “drive-by” media as he called them, threw his way. The following incident, however, required a major offensive.

Rush’s primary rule, according to his spokesman and strategist, Brian Glicklich, was “no faux apologies for fake transgressions.” A letter signed by 40-plus Democratic senators, sent to Rush’s syndicator, demanded an apology from Rush for a discussion he had with a listener. The subject of the discussion was “phony soldiers,” fraudulent people who claimed to have served heroically in the military, but did not. The letter claimed that Rush was denigrating these “heroes.”

Not only did Rush not apologize, nor would the apology have been accepted by the Democrats (as Glicklich points out), Rush sold the letter for $2.1 million, matching the sum from his own checkbook, and donated all of it “to scholarships for the children of fallen service members and police officers.”

Rush’s sponsors were then viciously attacked in the usual leftist manner of what looked like thousands of people sending thousands of emails threatening to stop patronizing the sponsors’ businesses. Rush did not just not back down; he provided research showing his sponsors “that 80% or more of all online boycott messages came from a group of people so small as to ‘fit into the elevator we used to come to your office for this meeting.’”

Finally, Rush realized that the handful of aggressors against his sponsors preferred to remain anonymous and unaccountable, so he named them on his website. Like all bullies, they ran.

Not apologizing, compromising, or backing down, Rush instead went on the offensive. “The Limbaugh doctrine against the suppression of speech,” as Glicklich put it, “was to offer more speech.” Rush often aggressively “fished for liberals’ outrage” and tweaked it, doing so with glee, or rather, in his words, “with half his brain tied behind his back, just to keep it fair.”

Rush Limbaugh, as did our previous president, taught many of us how to have guts and to display that intestinal fortitude.

Alan Dershowitz, a moderate Democrat, is an uncompromising First Amendment lawyer who, as victim of the cancel culture himself, has courageously and aggressively stood his ground. When falsely accused of sexual misconduct, he offered mounds of evidence in his defense, filed a defamation lawsuit, and wrote the book Guilt by Accusation.

More recently, Dershowitz wrote Cancel Culture: the Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process, in which he exposes the Stalinist and McCarthyite origins of such suppression of free speech. He also produced a video podcast “Cancel Culture Must Be Canceled.”

Dershowitz is very much aware of the need for more people to speak up. In an earlier video podcast he asked “Where are the libertarian Democrats?” The two words together likely mean Bill-of-Rights moderate Democrats, often called “liberals,” who have been far too silent over the past several years.*

In our postmodern age of the “Un-Enlightenment,” an age of untruth and unreason, will there be enough Jeffersonians to courageously counter the Goebbelsian propaganda that is spewed ceaselessly and ubiquitously?

As Rush said, to counter the suppression of free speech, more speech is needed—spoken and written without compromise or concession.

It just takes guts!


* Moderate Democrats, such as Dershowitz, are mixed-economy-Democrats who see some role for the government to regulate business. Far left or leftist Democrats today want the government to control every aspect of our lives, social and economic, which makes them totalitarians, whether of the communist, socialist, or fascist variety. The usual meaning of libertarian is classical liberalism or laissez-faire capitalism.