While progressives were taking a victory lap following their successful effort to defeat Donald Trump in 2020, they were also giving him a brutal education on the malicious power and long reach of an incandescently angry centralized government. Leftists from the federal level all the way down to state and local officials cast barely a glance at their own scorched cities, their devastated businesses, and murdered citizens as they instead turned their attention and the instrumentalities of government against Donald Trump and Americans on the political right who questioned the efficacy of the election or expressed their disagreement with any bylaw of progressive dogma. Hell hath no fury like a bureaucracy scorned.
For his part, President Trump spent the ensuing four years — when he wasn't in court or being shot at — internalizing the adage that "personnel is policy" and focusing his personnel choices toward people who understand that entrenched bureaucracies cannot simply be parred back. They must be uprooted lest they spread like kudzu, suffocating every vestige of individual liberty. In short, Donald Trump learned first-hand what Ludwig von Mises wrote in his 1944 book, "Bureaucracy":
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, yet they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent on abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight!
The Mises Institute's David Brady Jr., brilliantly captured the basic difference between a bureaucracy and private enterprise, observing that the operations of private enterprises are motivated by profits and tend toward streamlined performance and maximum efficiency, while bureaucratic organizations, blind to market forces, are characterized by inefficient operations and are predatory in nature. As bureaucracy exercises increasing control over private enterprise — via regulation and taxation — the management of a private business inevitably needs to hire tax accountants, human resource specialists, occupational safety and compliance managers, and others who are specially trained to ensure the business is compliant with the government's bureaucratic dictates.
As Mr. Brady writes, "Having control over funds and legal protection of their jobs, it is easy for these private bureaucrats to subvert private enterprise and steer resources toward their desires. Hence, human resources pushing 'woke' causes in global corporations." And when this is done in coordination with government bureaucracies who mandate various tasks and expenditures that are incompatible with private business' profit goals, the result is yet more bureaucrats!
As a practical example, look at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that, in the hands of progressive administrations, has functioned as a bureaucratic cudgel with which to limit consumer choices in everything from automobiles to land use, home appliances, and more. President Trump's choice of Lee Zeldin to become the EPA's administrator yielded historic results a few days ago when he announced "...the most consequential day of deregulation in American history."
By removing the boot of the federal government off the neck of America's energy producers, Zeldin promised, "Our actions will lower the cost of living by making it more affordable to purchase a car, heat your home, and operate a business." He added that "Jobs will be created, especially in the US auto industry, and our nation will become stronger for it."
As Beth Brelje wrote at The Federalist,
The changes are not a done deal yet. The EPA listed regulations it will "reconsider," such as the Obama era regulation on power plants called Clean Power 2.0, which called on coal-fired power plants eliminated virtually all carbon emissions by 2032. A disastrous plan that caused some plants to close, thrusting the power demand onto remaining power plants, a recipe for increased power costs.
Zeldin is also taking a close look at the Obama Administration's Endangerment Finding, which declared that under the Clean Air Act, certain greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere endangered public health. Specifically, the Endangerment Finding paved the way for reductions in new vehicle emissions of various "greenhouse gases," including carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), among others.
The idea was to increase the price of new vehicles through increased regulations to incentivize Americans to look favorably on Electric Vehicles (EV). In fact, the Biden-Harris administration had gone so far as to phase in a steady increase of regulations on light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles to eventually phase out gas-powered vehicles. As Zeldin announced on X, "Our actions will unleash American energy dominance, strengthen the U.S. auto industry, and protect our environment."
And that, sports fans, is how to attack entrenched bureaucracies at the root level. "The core lesson," writes David Brady, Jr., "is that bureaucracy expands. It must expand because every bureaucrat is self-interested (whether for monetary, ideological, or religious reasons) and thinks their cause is just. They wish for higher roles and higher pay. To achieve this, new work must be found. The bureaucratic expansion over all aspects of society must continue."
This is why, in an era of ever-expanding bureaucracies, the (self-interested) bureaucrat becomes a sycophant of an agency whose existence depends on its continued expansion through the whole of society. It is no coincidence, therefore, that bureaucrats themselves scream the loudest when their trough begins to dry up. Incidentally, this is one reason why I declined to take civil service employment following my retirement from active duty. I had no interest in becoming a cog in the bureaucratic machine, preferring to seek employment in the productive sector instead.
In former Vice President John C. Calhoun's book, "Disquisition on Government," which was published posthumously in 1851, he observed that government bureaucracies create two general classes of society and then pits them against each other: net tax payers and net tax consumers. The greater the burden of taxes on the taxpayers, the greater the antagonism grows between them and net tax consumers. As Calhoun writes:
But the effect of this is to place them in antagonistic relations in reference to the fiscal action of the government and the entire course of policy therewith connected. For the greater the taxes and disbursements, the greater the gain of the one and the loss of the other, and vice versa; and consequently, the more the policy of the government is calculated to increase tax and disbursements, the more it will be favored by one and opposed by the other.
The effect, then, of every increase is to enrich and strengthen the one [the net-tax consumers], and to impoverish and weaken the other [the net-tax payers].
This is prescient stuff for someone to observe over 175 years ago, yes? Human nature, however, remains constant, along with the desire of some to live at the expense of others. The burden on the American net-taxpayer has grown exponentially and at a rate commensurate with the growth of the bureaucratic empire's ubiquitous web of rules and fees and directives and penalties.
It is invigorating beyond expression that we finally have a president who understands the continuum of human nature and whose experience with bureaucracies over the course of decades has enabled him to select the right people to uproot those that do damage to society and a free people. In a refreshing change, we have in Donald Trump an advocate for the net-taxpayer.
