Peter St Onge
Peter is an economist, a Fellow at the Mises Institute, and a former MBA professor.
The catastrophic mismanagement of Hurricane Helene relief is showing the American people that Washington’s dysfunctional but, worse, it doesn’t even seem to be trying to serve the people.
Instead, we serve it. Like livestock.
So how did we get here?
The Long March of Bureaucracy
As with the economy, the seeds of our political crisis began a hundred years ago in the Progressive era.
The Progressives’ big year for taking over the economy was 1913, with the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act.
But the political takeover was earlier – according to historian Murray Rothbard, it began precisely 30 years earlier with something called the Pendleton Act of 1883.
The act made bureaucrats professionals who are independent of politicians. This was allegedly to fight corruption, but note that a bureaucracy that’s independent of politicians is also independent of voters.
After all, politicians are the only part of the government who answer to voters. So if bureaucrats don’t answer to them, who do they answer to?
Simple: they answer to nobody. The government bureaucracy becomes a self-serving occupying army. By design.
Bureaucrats and Angels
Progressives did this because they’ve convinced themselves that government workers are omniscient angels – that the act of collecting a government paycheck is a kind of purifying bath that washes away the greed and malice of the unwashed masses over whom the government lords, and parasites.
This may sound goofy, but talk to a Progressive.
Of course, after Covid anybody who thinks bureaucrats are omniscient angels needs a lobotomy.
The Union of Bureaucrats and Socialists
Once installed with Pendleton, this independent bureaucracy was, of course, captured by the left – socialists. Because they both wanted the same thing: increased government control.
They began in the Progressive Era with widespread regulations that were billed as “reining in” Big Business but were, of course, written by Big Business, marketed by their paid socialist activists, and then implemented by bureaucrats whose funding came from politicians on the payroll – well, the donor lists – of Big Business.
And so was born our Corporatist system – of course, there’s another word for it that begins with F and ends in -ism, but then I’m not trying to get censored.
Socialism’s “Inevitability”
This capture is why it feels the world is grinding ever more socialist: the bureaucracy partners with socialists to a common end: government control over the people.
They then use government money – your money – to propagate the takeover through academia, media, and corporations who are punished if they don’t toe the line. Elon Musk’s regulatory harassment is just one example.
It can feel intimidating: Covid showed us there is essentially no institution in the country that has not been infiltrated by this toxic combination of government money and intimidation.
The cartels call it plata o plombo. Silver or lead. And the socialist Deep State uses both.
Crisis and the Deep State
Over the past century, every crisis grew this Deep State: world wars, Great Depression. Even made-up crises like global warming and, of course, Covid.
Covid was their dream come true: total control.
The problem, of course, is that once a wild animal tastes human blood you can never trust it again.
That’s exactly what happened in a moment I think is very close to today: The wartime socialism of World War I.
The men who pushed World War I – men like Herbert Hoover – imposed Soviet-style economic and social control during the war.
Once the war ended, they were very reluctant to hand that power back, and they spent the rest of their careers trying to get it again.
Unfortunately, the stock market crash of 1929 was the excuse they needed. They used it to seize the commanding heights of the economy — the administrative state. And, 100 years later, they still run it.
So that all takes us to today: a totalitarian Deep State that progressively seizes economic, social, and political power. Enslaving us with debt, mandates, taxes, and surveillance.
The administrative state can be defeated, but not by fighting the hydra head by head. Rather, you go to the source: the independent bureaucracy.
To end the totalitarian deep state, politicians must have the ability to fire and hire anybody they like. Because the people must have that power, and until we abolish governments, politicians are their only voice.
The only alternative is progressive enslavement by bureaucratic commissars until the people rise up and fix it by other means that few will enjoy.
Republished by the Brownstone Institute from the author’s Substack.
