David Brooks of the New York Times, in a recent piece titled, “The Technocracy Boom,” makes some astonishing — even to the initiated — observations about the rise of government bureaucracy in America over just the last decade. Here are just a few of the alarming facts:
The portion of government dealing with “national security” matters now involves more than 1,200 separate agencies working in collusion with 1,900 private companies at roughly 10,000 different physical locations. 854,000 people now have top-level government security clearance to pursue “counterterrorism intelligence.” These individuals produce 50,000 separate reports per annum. To quote Brooks: “A flow of paper so great that many are completely ignored.”
Obamacare created 183 brand new government agencies, commissions, panels, and bureaus. Examples? The Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement Program. The Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee. The Cures Acceleration Network Review Board. The Independent Medicare Advisory Council. And so on. New teams of “experts” were placed within the Office of Personnel Management to regulate insurance companies in health care transactions, and to survey statistics to determine, allegedly, which medical treatments and practices “work best and most efficiently.” Visions of Nazism, anyone? And, the FBI and BATFE, under Obamacare, can troll anyone’s medical records to bar firearms ownership. On top of all of this, 2011 will see all-time record tax hikes to pay for all of this wonderful and oh-so-necessary intrusiveness.
The recent financial reform law was 2,319 pages of bureaucratic banter — seven times longer than the last five banking laws combined. It also created the Financial Stability Oversight Council — a body of, again, “experts” directed to write rules and regulations in 243 separate areas. To briefly, if incredibly, quote Brooks again: “Government experts were told to take a complex, decentralized system — in this case the financial markets — and impose, rules, rationality, and order.”
I see. Just like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao wanted “rules, rationality, and order.”
I submit to you in an appeal to reason that no society, however big, or populated, or industrialized, or militarily supreme can long survive under the strangling dead weight of such monstrous interventionism and top-heavy centralism. The ultimate premise of Brooks’s article is that history will look back on the period we are living through at present in very different ways, depending upon the outcome. In one case, Brooks says, we’ll have all witnessed “powerful evidence” that central regulations that can “organize” society and commerce.
Where was Brooks when the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc fell?
Alternatively, he adds: “If the reforms fail … then the popular backlash will be ferocious. Large sectors of the population will feel as if they were subjected to a doomed experiment they did not consent to.” He goes on to add that these people will feel as if society “has been hijacked by a self-serving professional class mostly interested in providing for themselves.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling that way already, and have been for a long time. I never consented to any of this — in particular because I refuse for that very reason to vote. History has already shown us, time and again, that centralized government planning only leads to destitution and despotism. That America, under a political government, is rapidly escalating into a full-blown police state is more than evident. No amount of voting, or “reform,” or seeking political solutions of any kind is going to end this spiraling whirlwind of bureaucratic madness. It’s time get sane. It’s time to simplify. It’s time to reject government altogether, and dump it into the garbage can of history.
