ClayBarham
12-01-2007, 06:13 PM
I suppose everyone has heard you can put a live frog into a pot of cool water, turn on the heat, watch the water boil and the frog cook, without his first jumping out. Americans are frogs when it comes to the growth of government and of its bureaucracy. Seventy-five years ago, the Federal Budget, supporting a whole range of interventions into our daily lives, was a mere four billion dollars. Now, it is in the trillions of dollars and the bureaucracy has swollen to a position where it is our most prominent church. A large number of Americans either worship bureaucracy or serve in its choir. It is the biggest single burden placed upon the liberties of Americans, and is involved in every facet of behavior. It is the American Cancer.
Legislators and executives, to regulate certain isolated human functions, establish new bureaucracies. For the most part, they are watchdogs over the activities of people. Like all organizations within organizations, they must either grow or die, and since death is not their aim, they find excuses to grow. What soon characterizes all bureaucracies is routine. They acquire procedures, use them, and they become repetitive routines which never change. As to competency to regulate anything, they become like the night nurse in the hospital who, making her midnight rounds, wake the patients to give them their sleeping pills. When faced with decision-making, they create a committee who must consider all the facts and facets, match it to existing routines, and pass judgments. If the decision is one that allows a new idea or invention to go forward, something that challenges the accepted and established routines, they will say no.
Look at the American bureaucracy today. From the Executive Branch, you see a giant organization chart with fifteen cabinet departments answering to the president, each one a massive bureaucracy we recognize and accept, laughingly, as thoroughly incompetent and unable to perform its assigned tasks. New cabinet officer appointments have no effect below their own level and change nothing. The bureaucracy itself will not allow it, or consider it by a lethargic, disinterested and cowardly committee. The framework established by our Founders, gave us four cabinet officers to assist the President. There was a State Department, a Treasury Department, a War Department and a Justice Department. Under the auspices of all four departments, all that was ever required of the Federal Government could be found. Today, in addition to those four still growing bureaucracies, we have eleven more. Every time there is a unique problem in America, a new Cabinet Department is formed, to be involved in ways never intended by our Founders. It is understandable why the Federal Budget is now in the trillions simply by having to pay to operate fifteen incompetent bureaucracies each year. Each siphons funds from taxpayers to pay for more people and more incompetence.
People today who run for public office are asking us to anoint them as priests of the big American bureaucracy so they can add their programs to them, increasing, never decreasing, their functions. If Homeland Security has not rebuilt New Orleans quick enough, provided new homes and income to those flooded out, and their local bureaucracy to function with more people, another bureaucracy must replace them. Once formed, funded, staffed and oriented to a routine, it can then assume the responsibility, and the voters of New Orleans can be happier in their unfulfilled anticipation.
If America is ever to free itself from this enormous cancerous growth sucking up all the resources, the gears of the Federal machine must be jammed into reverse. The first step is to stop all hiring and do not replace anyone retiring from civil service. If employees are needed, get them from other departments. Staffs must be cut at least 10 percent per year. Then, return to the original framework, the elimination of eleven of the fifteen cabinet departments. Set a time, within a four-year presidential term, to pass all the functions and revenues of the departments being eliminated back to the states, in proportion to their population. Inform each state they will have to tax their citizens if they are to sustain the level of revenue, and eliminate federal taxation proportionately as this is being done.
Obviously, none of this can ever work if the American voter elects people who want more government to run everyone’s lives and decide what each person may earn and save. It can only be pulled off if people are elected who believe America, as it was founded, is the best answer to our social problems, that of leaving it to the local and state governments. Some may prefer the Huey Long model of bureaucratic socialist dream state. In such cases, the productive individuals will have to move out as was done in Louisiana early in the 20th century.
The enemy and the biggest threat to the survival of America is bureaucracy, not the left or the right. President Bush may have run as a conservative Republican to cut government, but he accomplished nothing when it comes to shrinking the cancerous bureaucracy. The only way to save us is to cut out the cancer finally, then take steps to prevent its growth in the future.
Legislators and executives, to regulate certain isolated human functions, establish new bureaucracies. For the most part, they are watchdogs over the activities of people. Like all organizations within organizations, they must either grow or die, and since death is not their aim, they find excuses to grow. What soon characterizes all bureaucracies is routine. They acquire procedures, use them, and they become repetitive routines which never change. As to competency to regulate anything, they become like the night nurse in the hospital who, making her midnight rounds, wake the patients to give them their sleeping pills. When faced with decision-making, they create a committee who must consider all the facts and facets, match it to existing routines, and pass judgments. If the decision is one that allows a new idea or invention to go forward, something that challenges the accepted and established routines, they will say no.
Look at the American bureaucracy today. From the Executive Branch, you see a giant organization chart with fifteen cabinet departments answering to the president, each one a massive bureaucracy we recognize and accept, laughingly, as thoroughly incompetent and unable to perform its assigned tasks. New cabinet officer appointments have no effect below their own level and change nothing. The bureaucracy itself will not allow it, or consider it by a lethargic, disinterested and cowardly committee. The framework established by our Founders, gave us four cabinet officers to assist the President. There was a State Department, a Treasury Department, a War Department and a Justice Department. Under the auspices of all four departments, all that was ever required of the Federal Government could be found. Today, in addition to those four still growing bureaucracies, we have eleven more. Every time there is a unique problem in America, a new Cabinet Department is formed, to be involved in ways never intended by our Founders. It is understandable why the Federal Budget is now in the trillions simply by having to pay to operate fifteen incompetent bureaucracies each year. Each siphons funds from taxpayers to pay for more people and more incompetence.
People today who run for public office are asking us to anoint them as priests of the big American bureaucracy so they can add their programs to them, increasing, never decreasing, their functions. If Homeland Security has not rebuilt New Orleans quick enough, provided new homes and income to those flooded out, and their local bureaucracy to function with more people, another bureaucracy must replace them. Once formed, funded, staffed and oriented to a routine, it can then assume the responsibility, and the voters of New Orleans can be happier in their unfulfilled anticipation.
If America is ever to free itself from this enormous cancerous growth sucking up all the resources, the gears of the Federal machine must be jammed into reverse. The first step is to stop all hiring and do not replace anyone retiring from civil service. If employees are needed, get them from other departments. Staffs must be cut at least 10 percent per year. Then, return to the original framework, the elimination of eleven of the fifteen cabinet departments. Set a time, within a four-year presidential term, to pass all the functions and revenues of the departments being eliminated back to the states, in proportion to their population. Inform each state they will have to tax their citizens if they are to sustain the level of revenue, and eliminate federal taxation proportionately as this is being done.
Obviously, none of this can ever work if the American voter elects people who want more government to run everyone’s lives and decide what each person may earn and save. It can only be pulled off if people are elected who believe America, as it was founded, is the best answer to our social problems, that of leaving it to the local and state governments. Some may prefer the Huey Long model of bureaucratic socialist dream state. In such cases, the productive individuals will have to move out as was done in Louisiana early in the 20th century.
The enemy and the biggest threat to the survival of America is bureaucracy, not the left or the right. President Bush may have run as a conservative Republican to cut government, but he accomplished nothing when it comes to shrinking the cancerous bureaucracy. The only way to save us is to cut out the cancer finally, then take steps to prevent its growth in the future.