The Nation's Pulse/Busting the Bureaucracy
Ledeen, Michael
Busting the Bureaucracy by Michael Ledeen / n the midst of the second democratic revolution, our leaders have lost their bearings, which is neither surprising nor daunting. None of our current...
...If Congress doesn't like our foreign policy, then let it propose something better...
...Some years ago a local TV station polled passers-by during lunch hour in the heart of downtown Washington, and found 80 percent (trust 1Martin Gross's excellent new book The Government Racket (Bantam, $7.99) gives...
...Mosca observed that "all political regimes are of necessity ruled by . . . an organized minority controlling a disorganized majority...
...But now it's a buyer's market...
...And they must limit their tenure to eightyears for the House and twelve for the Senate, for excessive power and perks accompany people who want to spend their lives in government, not those who are doing a brief stint of public service...
...Meanwhile, the French historian Emmanuel Beau de Lomenie wrote a lengthy series, La Grande Bourgeoisie, chronicling the amazing survival of the French bureaucracy from Napoleon to the 1920s...
...We should be lobbying for the end of the misnamed act that gave us the modern Star Chamber...
...But the Founders could not have anticipated that the two great goals of civil society—freedom and virtue—would be threatened by the emergence of that most modern of political phenomena: bureaucracy...
...This is not to say that the bureaucrats themselves do not have a clear political profile...
...they had come under the rule of what he called the Iron Law of Oligarchy...
...we then discovered that it grows all by itself...
...Today, the federal bureaucracy numbers 3 million people, and state and local bureaucracies add another 15 million, numbers that are undoubtedly low, The American Spectator October 1992 41 because they include only salaried employees...
...Losers should be required to pay the legal costs of winners...
...Some of our recent laws, like the latest Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, are fruits of the great Make-Work-ForLawyers movement...
...Meanwhile, much can be done to help the rest of us escape their grasp...
...Agreed...
...lawyers in the world afflict us in the United States of America, and every law they draft creates a new layer of bureaucrats to defend it...
...Remember that the Postal Service is one of the few government agencies that actually does some work, and the ease with which 40,000 were fired suggests that there are tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of others who could be removed, to the benefit of all of us...
...And once the Congress realized how powerful the executive bureaucracy had become, it created its own...
...Meanwhile the Colonial Office grew from a mere 372 in 1935 (when Britain had a substantial empire) to 1,661 in 1954 (when there was hardly an empire left...
...Then we can see how much remains to be done...
...Yet our new revolutionary mission—the dismemberment of the bureaucratic state—is made clearer and easier if our vision is not clouded by dazzling leadership...
...For many years, we maintained a Faustian pact with big government, accepting it so long as it protected us from the dangers of fascism first and Communism later on...
...The myriad new residents of Washington are in the private sector, but in name only, for they are paid by the government...
...As the preeminent example of the folly of criminalizing policy disagreements, Walsh has been trashing the survivors of the Reagan Administration's foreign-policy team...
...It matters not whether the President is liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat...
...As Ludwig von Mises observed, when a leader delegates, he loses power...
...Bureaucracy is the weapon of choice for those who distrust the people...
...Professional politicians should be required to swear to reduce their own staff by at least 50 percent within six months of reaching (or returning to) Washington...
...That official statistics indicate that the Parkinsonian expansion has not occurred—that for the past twenty years, the number of official, salaried employees has remained virtually unchanged—is a hoax of monumental proportions...
...For starters, let's call for a 50 percent reduction, including all the hidden contractors and consultants...
...Administration replaces electoral politics...
...T hat still leaves us with too many lawyers...
...we can refinance...
...America was the last of the Western nations to fall into the clutches of the bureaucrats, but by the 1950s, C. Wright Mills could write: "The executive bureaucracy becomes the arena within which and in terms of which all conflicts of power are resolved or denied resolution...
...By painstakingly tracking the family histories of hundreds, of French civil servants, Beau de Lomenie was able to prove that the actual management of French government had remained in the hands of d few hundred families through a period that encompassed the Napoleonic era, the restoration of the monarchy, the bourgeois revolutions of the early nineteenth century, the Second Empire, the restoration of "bourgeois democracy" after the fall of Napoleon III, and the Great War...
...Consult the statistics on campaign contributions, and you will find that the most influential PAC for liberal senators and congressmen is run by the Association of Trial Lawyers of America...
...The last had been a socialist in Germany, but by 1911 his studies had led him to the horrifying conclusion that European socialist parties, instead of bringing democracy to the continent, had been Michael Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...The first virtue of an administrator is to abide by the codes and decrees...
...S omeone has to draw up the regs and draft the legislation and write the manuals and prosecute those who try to escape, and that someone is invariably a lawyer...
...Every candidate must be asked to take an oath to that effect or face repudiation at the polls...
...Skeptical...
...He becomes a bureaucrat...
...If he offers the ex-bureaucrats their old salaries, fringe benefits, and pensions as of retirement age, he'll even avoid the limited political fallout from the enraged ex-bureaucrats...
...The President can order his Cabinet secretaries to reduce their bureaucracies at the same time...
...C. Northcote Parkinson proved that there is no relationship between the growth of bureaucracy and work actually performed...
...Like bureaucrats, liberals scorn innovation, eccentricity, and enterprise...
...CI 42 The American Spectator October 1992...
...Imagine how many bureaucrats could be purged from agencies that do no work at all...
...a sense of the real dimensions of the Washington bureaucracy...
...To limit the power of the subordinates, he issues regulations, and this is the magical event: "(Subordinates'] main concern is to comply with the rules and regulations, no matter whether they are reasonable or contrary to what was intended...
...First we must understand how our enemies subverted the vision of the Founders, who designed a political system to make tyranny of the traditional sort all but impossible, and counted upon the three governing branches to check and balance each other...
...Lawyers and bureaucrats go hand in hand...
...None of our current leaders expected the democratic revolution to succeed, and none has laid claim to its leadership...
...There is little danger of that from either Bush or Clinton, and who would give greater power to either of them...
...If we had journalists who were properly educated, there would be a lot more ridicule of lawyers, and that would help reduce their claim to grandeur...
...they prefer to legislate and enforce...
...taken over by "professional oligarchies...
...S o we learned that bureaucracy had powers and tenacity...
...Even if the accusations against them were true, the proper remedies are political, not judicial...
...liberals like bureaucracy more than conservatives do...
...If the public doesn't like the policy, let them vote out the government...
...While this system worked, no official—or, indeed, institution—could accumulate excessive political power...
...Straws in the revolutionary winds suggest the process may have already kicked in: almost half of the 250 biggest law firms in the United States got smaller in 1991...
...So we have ourselves a program: reduce the bureaucracy by half, install term limits, reduce the number of lawyers, encourage judges to throw some of these silly cases out of court, and shut down the Special Prosecutor...
...Parkinson saw the light while studying statistics on the British Admiralty between 1914 and 1928, a period that saw a 68 percent decrease in ships, a 31 percent decrease in officers and sailors, and a 78 percent increase in Admiralty officials...
...They are consultants and contractors, and it is exceedingly hard to determine how many they are and how much they cost us, because the official bureaucracy has been careful to hide them from public view.1 But the true horror of bureaucracy lies neither in its numbers, nor even its cost, but in its inevitably sinister effects on enterprise and innovation...
...The socialists might conquer," he wrote, "but not socialism, which would perish in the moment of its adherents' triumph...
...Later this year, the "Ethics in Government" Act comes up for renewal, and with it Judge Walsh's financial life-support system...
...the bureaucracy moves relentlessly forward, expanding its own sphere of influence at our expense...
...These guys aren't trained to be generous in law school, so we have to assume they like the results they're getting...
...The horrors that awaited us were evident 150 years ago to the French and Russian anarchists, but the first systematic analysis of bureaucracy was produced by a group of unorthodox political thinkers in Italy: Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Roberto Michels...
...If we're going to do with fewer lawyers, everyone else is going to have to do some serious work, even the politicians...
...Short of the kind of mass murder that Voltaire once called for, treating this health problem is like dealing with smoking or drugs: the public has to be educated and weaned from its addiction...
...Judges should be encouraged to throw more cases out of court...
...Look at the Postal Service, where 30,000 "managers" and 10,000 junior workers were purged in August...
...We can do better ourselves...
Vol. 25 • October 1992 • No. 10
