We saw this with the Roman empire. It caused many problems and contributed to its demise. Also with the large socialist states throughout history. It always leads to widespread corruption.
Oh stop it WSJ. Of course you guys are in on the corruption too. The civil service is a small part of the "deep state" that extends to all of the NGOs, consultancies and private "support service contractors" in the DC area. It includes all the folks in the "private sector" who earn a very good keep "assisting" 3rd world countries with applying for World Bank loans they will never be able to repay. It includes all the "beltway bandits" providing viewgraphs for pentagon officials trying to flog to other pentagon officials some new scheme for fleacing the taxpayer for some new defense project. It includes K-street of course, but hey those guys are at least honest whore who actually have to provide their paymasters value for money. It's the guy who consults for folks on "internet policy" or the gal who specializes in aranging poverty or AIDs tours to Africa for "fact-fiding"
The DC deepstate are the 96% in DC who voted against Trump and their counterparts in the surrounding mansion inflated "bedroom" communities.
Yes the upper level civil service are certainly part of it. But all they get out of it is a barely adequate by DC standars paycheck - admittedly for a job not worth doing at that requires no real skills.
Stuff like this boggles my mind. How can anyone think this?
Didn’t POSObama clamp down on whistleblowers?
I put a hold at the library on Ms. Strassel’s new book “Resistance (at All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America.” It comes out tomorrow.
Ms. Strassel is a real warrior in the fight against government corruption and the deep state permanent government.
For a long time I have been saying that the largest government lobby group is the ‘government employees’.
Especially in local elections the government employees are a large bloc of voters who control the result. If the government employees do not have enough votes to sway the election, then they call a ‘special election’ where fewer voters cast their vote.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the carrier of the plague. You have unbarred the gates of Rome to him.”
Taylor Caldwell in her novel based on the life of Cicero, A Pillar of Iron
Yep the true problem is the size of the bureaucracy. Until we cut it in half the problem will never go away.
An out of control bureaucracy is what brought down several Chinese dynasties.
I remember reading a book back in the 1980s called “Nomenklatura”. Sounds familiar. From Dictionary.com: a select list or class of people from which appointees for top-level government positions are drawn, especially from a Communist Party. https://www.amazon.com/Nomenklatura-Soviet-Ruling-Michael-Voslensky/dp/0385176570/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=nomenklatura&qid=1570892149&s=books&sr=1-1
What this dedicated STATEist & LEFTist (and his numerous cohorts of the 'intelligentsia' elites) leaves out is the fact that these bureaucrats are neither elected nor subject to the restraints on abuse of power derived through the Founder's 'Checks & Balances' controls!
Nobody elected Sally Yates.
Subordinates fawningly praised her in emails.
“You are my new hero,” wrote one federal prosecutor.
Another department colleague emailed: “Thank you AG Yates.”