Bureaucracy Eats Everything In Its Path

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – How many days have we gone down this road that the entities are too large to be managed by any one individual and the whole entity is most certainly too large to be managed by one individual?  If he or she were to try, then you would have a dictatorship.  Since no one in this country is going to insinuate or believe that a dictator is receiving a divine right to govern, meaning that he or she would be a queen or king, then you’re going to have a dictator.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  “The bureaucracies that ate Obama” is the title of an opinion piece.  This could be taken from a transcript from this radio program over the course of the last two years.

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It has been great fun this summer watching the intelligentsia rebuking President Barack Obama for “acting like some bloke on a bar stool getting his information from the evening news” rather than like a good take-charge progressive president, as the Washington Post’s über-liberal columnist Dana Milbank complained recently.

President Obama will accept “no control over the actions of his administration,” ignoring the Justice Department’s . . . to Milbank’s, asking “if the president doesn’t run the government, then who does?” Charles Krauthammer went so far as to question whether “anyone is stupid enough to believe” that the IRS targeting was not planned from the top.

In fact, every serious student of public administration knows the federal government is unmanageable, a fact verified even by the progressive experts at the National Commission on the Public Service itself. The commission has proposed reforms for years—usually inadequate—but even they are routinely ignored by left and right. Its experts dare not question adding new ungovernable programs like Obamacare, but deep down they know the present system is already too bureaucratized, and adding large new programs must make things worse.

The dirty secret is that no one at the top runs these programs.

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Mike:  How many times have I told you this?  How many days have we gone down this road that the entities are too large to be managed by any one individual and the whole entity is most certainly too large to be managed by one individual?  If he or she were to try, then you would have a dictatorship.  Since no one in this country is going to insinuate or believe that a dictator is receiving a divine right to govern, meaning that he or she would be a queen or king, then you’re going to have a dictator.  I don’t think you’re going to like the way that turns out either, Mr. Milbank.

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The dirty secret is that no one at the top runs these programs. The president has little idea what the two million person bureaucracy below him does. Poor Hillary Clinton was criticized for signing official cables on the Libyan fiasco, when everyone who knows anything knows no secretary of state ever sees 99 percent of what she signs. Krauthammer may not believe that relatively low-level IRS agents could decide to go after enemies all on their own. But many there actively supported Obama, and even the higher-ups named so far, with one possible exception, were liberal career employees. As far as the AP leaks, what Attorney General under attack, as Eric Holder has been, would dare question subordinates who invoke “national security”? What about the bureaucratic leaks if he did not signed off?

Ignoring that the bureaucratic forces and commitment necessary do not exist, neoconservatives keep demanding the U.S. save more failed states such as Syria. Oops—now it is Egypt again. Where did that come from? Some social conservatives want more power for the Department of Health and Human Services to “support families,” even though its bureaucrats are to the left of the IRS. Many economic conservatives supported the Treasury and Federal Reserve architects of the Wall Street bailout, when their bureaucrats have positive distain for the market. But the strangest bedfellow demanding bureaucratic help is the libertarian. He relies on judicial experts, especially those Ivy League-only stewards sitting on the Supreme Court.

Libertarians placing their hopes on nine old wizards from our elite universities, appointed for life and responsible to no one, confuse means and ends. Such libertarians want freedom as the end but do not want anyone outside the judicial system to be free to contradict the beliefs of the court when it comes to important matters like rights, which these days cover just about everything. Not being able to sue the feds because of sovereign immunity and judicial deference, these activists mainly go after the easier target of local government. The problem is that in targeting local abuses they inadvertently increase national power by nationalizing the local issues.

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Mike:  I could have written this thing myself.  This is just perfect.  Then he goes on to detail some of the abuses, Donald Devine.  I almost wanted to say Andy Devine.  How many of you listening out there have [singing] “an autographed picture of Andy Devine?”  A little pencil-thin mustache there, huh?  Back to Donald Devine, not to be confused with Andy.

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And the basic fact is that the national bureaucracy is sclerotic: it cannot act in a rational manner. [Mike: How many times have I said this? This is just gospel here, republican gospel.] It is overwhelmed, and even President Obama understands this. At the press conference that so irritated his liberal pals when he tried to explain the “glitches and bumps” reported about Obamacare, his explanation was unintentionally revealing: “Oh look, this thing’s, you know, not working the way it’s supposed to, and this happened and that happened. And that’s pretty much true of every government program that’s ever been set up.”

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Mike:  That is because they are, by definition, not designed to and cannot work.  The reason they cannot work is because human beings are not automatons.  We cannot be programmed to do the same task over and over and over again without exception.  That’s why we are humans and we are not computers, because we will and do and you can count on us making mistakes.  To say you can program a bureaucracy that has, lay your goal out, doesn’t matter what it is, and that we’re going to write rules in January 2013 and they’re going to be good until December 31, 2016 is just beyond preposterous.  This is insanity.  You would get laughed out of the universal high court if you were bring that in front of God and his lieutenant.  [mocking] “Ha!  Have you actually tried that?  We wouldn’t even try that and we know what’s going to happen”

This is the folly here, in men and women believing that if we just put the right people in there, turn the screws the right way or manually adjust the levers or turn this tax rate up or turn that one down that we can effect the change.  You can’t and won’t and it’s never going to work.  The only possible hope that we have and that mankind has is either, one, an actual divine king who actually is a servant and is God’s lieutenant on Earth, who actually is a good, kind, benevolent, wise and judicious king.  The only problem with that is he will die sometime and who will replace him, another divinity, or will you get a Charles II?  That’s one option.  The other is, if men are to govern themselves, then they must only be able to govern themselves in small and local instances.  Then and only then does the option of leaving one dysfunctional and tyrannical sphere for the safety of a nearby not-as-dysfunctional sphere hold itself out.

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This is probably why the Privileges and Immunities Clause was so important to the republicans that attended the convention in Philadelphia in 1787.  You’ve got to have the privileges and immunities, because you have to have a place to escape to.  One state gets out of control and menaces its population, or one city in a state, you have to be able to pick up and move.  You’ve got to be able to rearrange, that is, as Ronald Reagan said, to vote with your feet.  This is the remedy here.  You can’t vote with your feet if you have a Supreme Court making decisions for 309 million people.  You can’t vote with your feet if you have a Congress saying: We’re going to have a policy when it comes to sugar and it’s going to be this.  It’s impossible to vote with your feet.

Even continuing this tomorrow morning is just going to deliver more of the same.  We might as well all either agree that we’re going to have to break this monster up and go about our business, and it’s not the end of the world if we do.  For heaven’s sake!  Would you rather continue this under the delusion that you can actually fix it (it’s not going to be fixed) or would you rather actually do something about it?  I say you ought to do something about it.  The doing something about it is not rearranging deck chairs in an agency in Washington, DC or in that agency’s satellite office in New Orleans.  That is not going to effect the change.  As a matter of fact, that’s going to make sure that the change never occurs.  It is the mechanism that is broken.  It is the theory that men can be guided and ordered from a central location and that our affairs will be ordered and happiness will ensue, speaking of political happiness.

This guy is absolutely correct.  What he’s basically saying is it doesn’t matter who you put in to run the general leviathan, it’s going to be a train wreck because it’s too big.  It is too big.  It cannot be managed.  It cannot be run.  As a matter of fact, I will submit to you that when the Constitution was being framed and being debated for ratification, one of the things the antifederalists, as they are derisively called, kept saying over and over and over again, that there was no way that a national government could possibly effect the safety and happiness and protect the liberties of people across a geography that was so large.  That could not happen.  Not only just the geography, but the cultural changes from north to south.  No, I’m not talking about slavery, I’m talking about the way people live and the way they’ve adapted to life in their own geography.  Republicanism was the only way to go and a strong central government would screw it up, and it would lead to what we have today.  It would lead to what began in the 1830s, culminated in 1865, and it has been a road to ruin ever since.

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Some people see this and see an actual path out.  Others see a path to imprisonment and permanency because of fear.  You refuse to consider my alternatives presented to you, not because you have some loyalty to your country.  You refuse and will not consider them — this is the royal “you” by the way — because you’re afraid.  You are afraid.  You’re scared, which is understandable, but nothing great ever came out of anything that was an act of timidity.  Do you think the men that signed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honors away in 1776, do you think that they knew the risks or that they had thought out: This is pretty risk.  We’re probably going to lose.  When they find us, they’re going to hang us from a tree.  That wasn’t necessarily an act of fear, it was an act of defiance.  It was an act of bravery, courage.  Courage is what is lacking today, courage.  Maybe we need that in larger and more concentrated doses.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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