Coming Attractions: Death by Bureaucracy

Coming Attractions: Death by Bureaucracy –

The Regulatory State is for Real

By Joseph Andrew Settanni


Bureaucracy, which is achieving its rabid apotheosis in the 21st century, is pandemic to any organized society and bespeaks of a collectivist attitude, whether public or private. It has crescively acquired, over the centuries, almost magical overtones and undertones that give it the seeming power of imperishable longevity beyond all combined lifetimes imaginable. It can, thus, forever self-justify its own existence indefinitely or, at least, that seems so.

Bureaucracy, the method of the system, (public) administration, officialdom, government, red tape (19th century Prussian bureaucrats literally wrapped up their documents with red tape), and other synonyms could fairly come to mind.

Good reading would still critically include Ludwig von Mises’ Bureaucracy, a slim volume that concisely and succinctly, nonetheless, discusses the truly basic essence of this subject better than most oversized volumes trying to be erudite. Mises (1881-1973), an Austrian School of Economics economist, surely got to the main core or fundamental principles involved in its pervasive reality and manifestation; and, its hellacious consequences.

Officialdom and Eternity

Admittedly, however, the broad nature of what is being dealt with or, at least, discussed is surely prolific and protean. There is a clearly marked and inherent “imperialistic” or, of course, logically bureaucratic tendency to simply expand and expand, to constantly engross upon itself more and more powers as if it were just an unstoppable cancerous growth; and, the political order or regime generally determines just how far bureaucratism may be allowed to go. Complex societies, as studied sociologically, seem to draw to themselves the ongoing bureaucratization of social, cultural, and institutional life.

Within bureaucracies, individual employees, mere common personnel and managers, just come and go, year by year, decade by decade or, sometimes, much longer; but, in sharp contrast, the bureaucracy, the administrative establishment, however, lives forever. It naturally rhymes, moreover, with such words as monarchy and for good reason, if profound thought is rightly given to this subject. What can be meant?

There had been, of course, the ancient expression: “The King is Dead! Long Live the King!” That meant that the institution of kingship, rulership, itself forever went on in (assumed) perpetuity; after one king died, the other then simply took his place as to a kind of almost eternal royalty, perpetual monarchy, stretching out over seemingly countless centuries having no real beginning or end as such. The easy parallel with officialdom or, if one prefers, government (aka public administration) is then frightening to behold. How so?

The monarchical system, as with the bureaucratic one, engenders the idea of continuity and eternity in the minds of human beings. In that sense, bureaucracy lives forever. So, “The Bureaucracy is Dead! Long Live the Bureaucracy!” has rather exactly, meaning in this modern era, the same kind of meaning symbolically speaking.

Both intriguingly and pointedly, the brilliant political scientist and philosopher Michael Oakeshott had, e. g., reminded modern people that most of politics, upon clear and careful analysis, is still involved with symbolism. The famous acronyms of certain historically famous bureaucracies, KGB, CIA, FBI, etc., are, furthermore, even thought to conjure up symbolic and real power and, of course, implacability.

Bureaucracy, when carried out to its most logical development, must become the reification of itself in the establishment of a supra-governmental reality that more than encompasses organizational public structures of administration, regulation, and control. It is the seemingly deified Regulatory State set beyond rational measure. But, this notion, contrary to liberal or leftist opinion, is not farfetched.

The inherently corrupt Iron Triangle: Big Government, Big Business and Big Labor, favors Capitalism, not any free-market economics, not entrepreneurship or genuine free enterprise; it so wants only State or crony Capitalism, meaning Neomercantilism as it is, sometimes, also called. The aggressive Regulatory State is famous (or infamous, rather) for its prohibitive and often crippling regulations that, normally, help to vilely crush or undermine small enterprise and mid-sized competitors against the Big Business interests, so bureaucracy certainly has its economic uses. Moreover, Austrian School economists have, extensively, documented the plain truth of what is being so confidently asseverated here.

Bureaucratic realities do self-perpetuate through, e. g., political entities in that, say, New York or New Jersey, whether as once a British colony, independent American State or, later, a member of the USA, yet remains New York or New Jersey; there is a certain definite continuity, and administrative bodies exist that can date themselves, as to origins at least, back to colonial times. That obviously covers the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries no less. [As Oscar Wilde was wont to remark, America’s youth is among its oldest themes.]

This fact can be empirically observed, for instance, in the public right of replevin as to the inalienability of government records in that public ownership is, in effect, eternal regardless of any time of physical separation though loss, (illegal) sales, or other dispositions (short of total destruction, of course).

In a kind of parallel sense, the operative “administrative” structure through time remains, as it were, simply inalienable or inviolate in that, e. g., when New York had once ceased being an independent State, by transitioning into being a member of the Union, it did not then just shut down those agencies engaged, e. g., in acts of taxation. The modern ideological notion of sovereignty, developed by Thomas Hobbes and others, holds sway: Leviathan (supported now by technocratic power).

Today’s Regulatory State, however, brings to mind the intriguing need to find a suitable and functional parallel with Roberto Michels’ (1876-1936) famous statement: Who says organization says oligarchy. It is his Iron Law of Oligarchy. Regarding, therefore, the highly important political and ideological fact of contemporary bureaucratization: Who says bureaucracy says socialism.

This can be prominently perceived, e. g., in the statism inherent to the integral workings of social-market economies, as related directly to their social-democratic regimes, as with Western Europe possessing many prime examples of this hyper-development of public administration, of regulationism for its own sake, knowing no real end in sight.

Bureaucratization has, moreover, always marked the unfortunate period near to the observed end of a society and civilization, its manifest ebb tide, the stultifying time of decline and decadence, degradation and dissolution, and not ever the vital beginnings or even, perhaps, the (still healthy) middle age of a corporate existence, a civilizational order.

Certainly, Mises’ many sagacious contentions as to the rather necessarily baleful consequences of the irrational pursuit of bureaucracy have been, therefore, so absolutely historically vindicated without question. And, furthermore, the (liberal Whig) doctrine of “American exceptionalism” is revealed to be just a bad joke.


With the expected reelection of Obama [the Scourge of God], as a case-in-point, the (also expected) future, Republican-dominated US Congress, House and Senate, will be basically assisting him with the quite massively bureaucratic transition of America into becoming a European-style, social-democratic State well beyond the present, ugly, welfare-warfare State that, in fact, already exists.

America will be transformed away from any “contract society” to a fundamentally “status society” more in line with recorded human history and, thus, more natural and less aberrational.

The past rise up from savagery, barbarism, primitivism, and traditional oppression, the movement from a status to a free contract society, is now to be substantially reversed; social mobility, for the working class especially and the middle class, is to be greatly hindered; people, increasingly, are to know their diminished place, within the new social order, with obedience and deference being highly stressed and enforced through more bureaucratic controls and constraints; there will be, consequently, the New Barbarism.

Currently, it is rather well known, for instance, that America has now the most regulated economy in the entire world, and this increasingly insatiable lust for comprehensive control is, moreover, yet further growing by leaps and bounds. One “tiny” example of this easily demonstrable fact is the ever massive Code of Federal Regulations, having no end in sight.

The predicted future is dark indeed, for who says bureaucracy says socialism. The political/ruling class, the power establishment, wants Obama to be reelected because he favors technocracy and Capitalism, which uses the rather convenient disguise of supposed collectivism.

Conclusion

Thus, in light of the Regulatory State as an ideal, the here aforementioned transition is, actually, just a simply natural and logical development; as a cognate and predictable result, increases of corruption, venality, oppression, subjugation, coercion, injustice, and tyranny are to come, along with the excessive bureaucratization of domestic reality, within this country.

It can be noted that the later political death, in effect, of free, constitutional, representative republican government is, therefore, to be a manifestly ignominious death by bureaucracy. And, the United States of America will, eventually, become an empty shell of its former self to all intents and purposes.

Once again, through much profound sadness and acquired wisdom, one can profitably quote T.S. Eliot: “… and this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”

God save the Republic!