But once they go to work in the executive branch, they slowly lose touch with the grassroots. Every day they talk to the same people in Washington — other political appointees and congressional staff, Washington insiders who are part of the company town. The longer they are here, the more they lose touch with the political base and the views of the heartland. All they see, hear, and think about is what goes on in the Washington “bubble,” a place where conservatives and conservative policies are treated with the utmost contempt and disdain. Making sure that conservative policies are implemented can become less and less important the longer they serve in that bubble.
Every year, all of these predominantly liberal federal agencies and departments get bigger and acquire more power. The most expedient solution to reducing the power and liberal influence of the federal government would require the radical downsizing of the entire executive branch. Unfortunately, that will never happen because the political will to do so does not appear to exist in Washington.
In fact, it is guaranteed that the exact opposite will happen.
I am absolutely convinced that you could cut every federal department in Washington in half and the average American would notice absolutely no difference in their everyday lives, despite the howling protests of the liberal press, the Washington political establishment, and the public employee unions. Downsizing would help reduce the constant interference that federal agencies exert in the lives of Americans because it would decrease the resources that the feds could spend on such interference. Unfortunately, this is not going to happen. In fact, the huge bailout (and nationalization) that has now involved the federal government in numerous industries, from banks to insurance to Wall Street, along with the unprecedented increase in the size of the federal government being implemented by President Obama, will be almost impossible to ever undo. I shudder to think about liberal career civil servants planning, directing, and otherwise acting as the governing management of significant portions of the formerly private sectors of our economy.
The executive branch of the federal government is an ever-growing behemoth that is slowly invading every facet of American life. The only way this will ever change is if conservatives finally realize that when they control Congress and the White House, that is only the beginning of the fight. They can only effect change and implement conservative public policy by capturing, controlling, and radically reducing the vast federal civil service bureaucracy in the executive branch.
Only then will the nation’s accelerating path towards socialization be halted and drawn back.
The situation may be out of control before many of these individuals ever get to Washington, DC. We must not forget that one usually has to be an intellectual whore to make it through the typical university graduate program. This is especially true regarding the process to obtain a Ph.D. It must be added that thankfully both the New York Times and the Washington Post may be out of business in the next few years. Alternative media outlets like Pajamas Media, Fox News, and countless conservative radio talk shows are making a huge difference. Lastly, center-right citizens now realize that their backs are to the wall. They will ultimately be hunted down and destroyed if they don’t fight back today.
It will never happen, Hans. The Behemoth is a Hydra with 30,000 dendrites from K Street sprouting heads which sprout more dendrites. If you could squeeze down on the balloon full of goo in the center, which you rightly state won’t happen, the goo will just ooze out into the network of NGOs and foundations until the next election comes and the center gets another shot of goo.
With this article you gave not only the effects, but you correctly pointed out the guilty: the pseudo conservatives, the annointed appointed scions of the Hamptons oligarchs, the cowards.
We approached the tipping point in the 30s, then passed it long ago, in the 60s. Nothing will stop the fall short of revolution or utter conquest from without.
The head of the commission was afraid it would “lead to a ‘mutiny’ among the career people at the commission.”
A mutiny sounds like a good idea to me.
if the will isn;t there to fix this now (and it isn;t) then it will become more difficult with time. which probably means you will be able to write this story again in 4, 8, 12 years etc.
a massive cull is probably the only way to do it as stated above. unfortunately at the end of Obama’s first term there will be a doubling of these same employees not a reduction.
as with most cronic problems the problem grows faster then the solution.
A revolution can solve the problem if the new government realizes that current civil service work regs need to be scrapped and rewritten. The advantage of a successful revolution is that you can then go to these leftist bureaucrats and tell them that they are fired effective immediately. I would tell them that their entire pensions will go into the general fund to help remedy the damage they have done. /daydream
Excellent three-part piece! Depressing, but illuminating, to the extent that light can be emitted by gloom. It reminds me of what happened to Frank Gaffney when he was working on a film that was supposed to be aired on PBS, but whose message ran afoul of the prevailing wisdom. His personal inclinations made him into an alien in the most fundamental sense of the term, one who is deprived of linkage from those who would otherwise be his social peers, or at the minimum, his natural collaborators!
All the devilish mechanisms described by Hans A. von Spakovsky may well be an inevitable consequence of prosperity. As it happens, the ancient Chinese character for “governement agent” clearly represents a fat man sitting under a roof, so the burden of officialdom has been chronicled before!
The drastic measures required to roll back this massive runaway corruption may simply be impossible to even initiate in prosperous times. But prosperity is not to be taken for granted, and burdensome administration is not helping the prospects of economic vigor.
Should things get dicey, the luxury of feeding the fat cats may well evaporate, and the notion of limited government may become appreciated again. I hope we don’t have to wait until the economy crumbles to attack the weight bearing down on it.
We can limit how long a civil service worker can be employed by the government. Pass a law to limit the employment contracts of all civil service employees to something like 10 years. Then give them a partial pension to supplement the retirement planning they do in their real careers. There isn’t one government job that should take more than five years to learn completely, so the efficiency of experience is not a factor here. Okay, none of the gutless wonders in Washington will ever pass such a law. Also, none of the idiots we send to Washington are competent to manage the replacement hiring. I just remembered, these nincompoops will try to fix an economy by printing money so they can spend it, so how do we expect them to do anything right? Oh well, let me know when the shooting starts.
TO: Maggie, et al.
RE: MUTINY, You Say, Mr. Christian!
Be prepared to shed ‘blood’, babe.
That is IF you have the ‘courage’ to ‘resist’.
But then again….
….unless you’re willing to give ‘everything’ for liberty….
….you don’t have what it ‘takes’ to establish and sustain it.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out.....]
I hate to burst everyone’s bubble but most non-appointed government employees are Indepedants, not Democrats.
Jeez, Hans, so you didn’t get confirmed. Get over it. Maybe if you hadn’t been up to your armpits in all those sleazy Deep-South voting laws designed to keep blacks from the polls, you’d have had an easier time with those eeeeeevil liberals.
No wonder that the term bureaucrats has for hundreds of years been synomynous with bad government.
Shef,
That was a typical presumptuous hack job by a typical useful idiot, who has heard his echo so many times that he suffers unknowingly from his unwarrented superiority complex.
To which of this myriad of voting laws do you object? I thought most of those were eliminated 50 years ago, but then, I was here. Get some help, smart guy. You need a real education.