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Renewing Limited Government: Bureaucracy

Guest post by: Michael Hume

Article Overview: Bureaucracy in the federal government is a little like bad weather: people complain about it, but nobody does anything about it. Jokes aside, the citizenry of the United States, intended to be enlightened and to rule itself, has slowly accepted huge and growing levels of ineffective federal bureacracy as inevitable, much like rain, snow, or high winds. But the time has come for America to see the difference. Bureaucracy can, and must, be limited....

Renewing Limited Government: Bureaucracy

As Bureaus Grow, The People Diminish by Michael D. Hume, M.S.

Bureaucracy in the federal government is a little like bad weather: people complain about it, but nobody does anything about it. Jokes aside, the citizenry of the United States, intended to be enlightened and to rule itself, has slowly accepted huge and growing levels of ineffective federal bureacracy as inevitable, much like rain, snow, or high winds. But the time has come for America to see the difference. Bureaucracy can, and must, be limited.

The American nation was founded on principles, the central of which was that the citizenry could rule itself on a temporal basis. The foundation of that experiment in government was the Constitution, which was presciently created to limit the government, thereby protecting the citizens from it and making them, not their government, sovereign (in a worldly sense). If the Constitution were still revered and followed, our nation - and, since we're its economic engine, the whole world - would not be in the pickle in which we currently find ourselves.

There are opponents to the Constitution and the notion of limited government - these days they go by the name "progressives," but you can substitute "liberal," "statist," "socialist," or "collectivist." They want bigger and bigger government, contrary to the design of America's Founders. They speak of hard-to-attack labels such as "fairness" and "good planning," but they really want the people limited and the government unlimited in what it can control and decide... and that's not the idea behind America.

The statists' ideas have been tried on a grand scale - the Soviet Union, Communist China, and National Socialist Germany were all attempts to run big countries on the basis of the sort of "fairness" and "central planning" the progressives thought would bring peace and prosperity. However, as each has proved in dramatic fashion, the collectivist nations don't work. They run out of other peoples' money, they create perverse incentives at every level of production, and they inevitably must resort to authoritarian militarism to extend their existence. Once their citizens have finally had enough of gulags and concentration camps, they bloodily throw off those regimes and seek a more sane survival.

Limited government had its experiment in the late 18th century, and it continues today in America. In contrast to the collectivist experiments, America has shown what personal liberty and responsibility, free markets and people, and limited government in a nation can do - and for more than two centuries, what that sort of system has done is create so much wealth and prosperity (and strength) that America has been able to carry the rest of the world on its back for generations. Without America, every person in every nation would be poorer and worse off than she is today.

So we find ourselves at a critical moment in history. America's freedom is hard-won, from its founding to today, and (as Ronald Reagan said) we are always just one generation away from losing it. If the current generation of voters in America lose sight of the real value in our nation and choose socialism, the world's prosperity is doomed and we're in for a few decades of darkness. To avoid that, we must act now to renew our adherence to our Constitution, renew limits on government, and free the markets up to do what they (and only they) can do - restore our strength and prosperity.

There are at least ten good limits that should be instituted (or restored) immediately. One of the biggest is bureaucracy. There are far too many government agencies, and far too many government workers employed in those agencies. The next administration should take a chain saw to the biggest trees that've grown (over decades) in the socialist jungle of Washington, D.C. - many of which have utterly failed in their missions and have had decades to do better.

If the federal government bureacracy (the unelected would-be masters of our nation) were to be pared by ten percent immediately, not only would the nation continue to function, it would function far better than it does today. And the vast amounts of money saved would go far enough toward solving our problems that the free market would easily be able to mop up the rest. Once again, the people would be free and less limited - free to start a business, make investments, risk their fortunes, create jobs and opportunities.

As with all of the limits I propose, I don't advocate eliminating all federal agencies completely. We do need some bureaucracy, just like we do need some taxation, some spending, and some regulation. But a blind man can see that this has grown WAY out of control, and imminently threatens our country. It's time to prune the bureacracy back, and place limits on how much it can ever grow again. Once we make the initial cuts, it won't be hard to run the numbers on the optimal size of bureaucracy - the number of agencies, government workers, and regulations should be pinned to the size of the population and the Gross Domestic Product of the nation.

I think you could identify at least a dozen federal agencies that could take an immediate (within one year) cut of ten percent. Every other agency should be cut five percent. Thereafter, a smart administration would insist on further cuts of five percent across-the-board for the next three years. At the end of that first term, the bureaucracy beast would be less than three-quarters its current size... and prosperous Americans would wonder why they hadn't insisted on such bureaucratic limits decades ago.

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