Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the bureaucratic part of the US government is not only unconstitutional, it poses the greatest risk to constitutionalism that exists today. Nowhere in the US Constitution is there permission given, for unelected administrators to pass laws, enforce those laws and punish infractions of their laws. Regulations that are written by bureaucrats have the full weight and measure of laws passed by elected members of Congress. Bureaucracy creates the darkness that allows unfettered growth of government intrusion. Regulation that stymies economic opportunities, limits people’s potential and protects the power and privilege of the Elite. To sharpen the point further, bureaucracy is not only a perversion of our founding principles, it has become immortal… like a demon, feeding on the rights of the people.
Bureaucracy is a threat for a myriad of reasons. The bureaucracy falls under the Executive, undermining the separation of powers in the Constitution, it works under the veil of darkness that bureaucracy provides, the members have no loyalty to the citizens, only to the department heads and other bureaucrats, but perhaps most alarming, is that bureaucracy changes the very relationship between the citizens and our government. The bureaucrat, being human, want’s job security and so there is no limit the bureaucrat will accept on his or her power to regulate, because that would put their cushy job at risk, thus immortalizing bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has the ability to pass thousands of pages of regulation annually. Think of it, tens of thousands of administrators, working tirelessly, passing pages of regulations every day, every month, and every year, regulating the most minute aspects of human existence, and that regulation necessarily becoming more intrusive each passing day.
The Founding Fathers of the US had in mind to limit the power, role and scope of government, by separating powers. They looked back at human history and recognized the natural progression of government. All the great civilizations were universally founded in some virtue, but over time, descended into totalitarianism. History shows this tendency of the Elite, invested with power over the affairs of men, to be without exception. The Founders understood this fact of human nature and sought to control it to protect mankind’s liberty. In this they looked at Constitutionalism as the best means available to limit the role, scope and power of the political Elite. They included Montesquieu’s Third Branch, taken from the Executive.
The Founders understood that it is usually the Executive that is the source of tyranny. Bureaucracy turns the logic of the Founders on it’s head, by coalescing all the power of government, back into the hands of the Executive. This is an obvious perversion of the most basic idea of the US Constitution, and renders moot Montesquieu’s idea of a Third branch, limiting the power of the Executive. Bureaucracy makes all other branches of government irrelevant by taking over all their functions. Even the Judiciary will become irrelevant as bureaucracy evolves to it’s natural end.
Some argue that Bureaucracy is efficient. They claim that the government could not maintain it’s scope and power, if bureaucracy were eliminated, and that all the good that comes from government regulation, clean air and water for example, would go away. The point they miss, (intentionally so), is that under the Federalist system, the Federal government was never supposed to have that power, scope or intrusiveness, to begin with! Those powers, under the Tenth Amendment, were given to the diverse States, to protect the environment, teach children, to build and maintain infrastructure. Furthermore, efficiency in oppression is not a good thing, and that is what bureaucracy must necessarialy become!
The individual States, have the Constitutional power to limit economic growth with regulation within their jurisdictions, they have the power even to set up bureaucracies. There are few limits to the power of the States under the US Constitution. Only those powers that are specifically given to the Federal government, and limits found in the Bill of Rights, are the State governments barred from enacting. Other than those few limitations the State government were given wide latitude to pass innovative laws and regulations. The States were to be little laboratories to test laws and regulations to plumb both their effectiveness and their utility. If a State’s regulations become so onerous economic activity is harmed, under the US Constitution, people have the right to vote with their feet, moving to a State with less oppressive laws. Under the new perverted Federal bureaucratic model… there is no escaping the oppression of the bureaucrat.
The State governments, the Legislative branch, and even the Judiciary, are being made redundant by bureaucracy. As power is moved further from the people and universalized, the limits on what government can,and cannot do, are blurred. Bureaucracy contributes to the natural growth of government power and eliminates the limits put on government by the Founders. That is why Bureaucracy is so dangerous… and why it is immortal. For true liberty to be restored, bureaucracy must be eliminated… but to kill an immortal is never easy, in fact, immortality bequeaths the immortal with arbitrary power as well as unlimited life.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
