Breaking the Administrative State

American Greatness ^ | October 182019 | Ned Ryun

[Hojczyk]

In fact, the two approaches to governing are completely incompatible. Even worse, those inside a powerful administrative state, much like the one we have today with over 430 departments, agencies and sub-agencies filled with millions of career employees, think that they are the decision makers on the domestic and foreign policy fronts. They believe they are entitled to rule us.

For those of us who believe in the original meaning of our Constitution, in limited government and natural rights, there is only one choice: break the state. Devolve it, not only in size, but also its purposes. Get it out of D.C.. Break its power base.

There can only be one winner in this struggle between Trump and the administrative state if we have any hopes for the republic surviving and that is the duly elected president of the United States who is the only one in this fight who represents the sovereign American people. If you think the state actors somehow are going to surrender, think again. Get ready for some more fireworks: the next year is going to be yet another bumpy, ugly ride.

[JPJones]

“For those of us who believe in the original meaning of our Constitution, in limited government and natural rights, there is only one choice: break the state. Devolve it, not only in size, but also its purposes. Get it out of D.C.. Break its power base. “

Should be FR Mission Statement.

This is what it’s all about.

[PGalt]

Great article. Thanks for posting.

break the state. Devolve it, not only in size, but also its purposes. Get it out of D.C.. Break its power base.

Start with the CFPB. DISMANTLE. Don't worry about the feathered fraud going on the warpath. We're not at the Little Big Horn.

[DarthVader]

Thanks posting this great article!

[ProgressingAmerica]

PING

This is something that repeatedly needs to be drilled. The administrative state didn’t start sometime in the early 2000s, it wasn’t born of the 1960s radicals, and naming FDR also misses the boat. Even this article gets it slightly wrong.

Yes, most of it as stated in the article does in fact start with Woodrow Wilson, but it all begins with Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson wrote the first dreams, but Teddy did more than anybody to actually do the act of giving birth.

Anti-trust and the issues surrounding the ICC between 1903 and 1908 must be eliminated or else why bother complaining about the administrative state in the first place?

Overall, this is a good article and a great brief primer.

[Regulator]

“They believe they are entitled to rule us”

Yup. Just talk to them. They ain’t bashful about telling you that.

Democracy? Oh that’s for those tourists in Congress, or that guy who lives in El Casa Blanca for a few years.

We live here forever. We make the rules, we run the place.

That’s the mentality.

[laplata]

Everyone on our side needs to realize that in the end, only one side will be left standing. We’d better make it us left standing.

[laplata]

Thanks for posting this.

[Hojczyk]

The problem is we need a Trump like president for thirty years to get rid of the DC state...

The only way is get rid of all the departments and send everthing back to the states..

You have to get rid of the MONEY..

Trump like Reagan will only be a bump in the road..unless people wake up..

Reagans biggest mistake George Bush...

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

All very well to speak of the Administrative State, or the Deep State - but the “state” in plain sight is the journalism cartel.

Plainly, the Administrative State and the Deep State depend on the Democrat Party - and the Democrat Party is all “liberal,” all the time. And “liberal” has been redefined by the journalism cartel (exactly as “progressive,” “moderate,” and “centrist” have been redefined by the journalism cartel) to mean precisely what “objective” has been redefined by the journalism cartel to mean.

In the cartel’s lexicon, “objective” is to be applied only to a working journalist, and those other virtuous term are never to be applied to any working journalist - but otherwise all those terms are the same - they mean nothing other than “congenial to the perspective and interest of the journalism cartel.”

Anti-trust and the issues surrounding the ICC between 1903 and 1908 must be eliminated or else why bother complaining about the administrative state in the first place? - ProgressingAmerica

I understand and sympathize with complaints about anti-trust, but the journalism cartel is a specific and egregious case.

“The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.” ― Alexander Hamilton

. . . and "every sudden breeze of passion or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interest" is exactly what the journalism cartel exists to produce. That makes the existence of the journalism cartel deeply problematic, IMHO, for anyone who thinks that anti-trust is illegitimate.

The only other point of vulnerability I see in the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan dispensation - and thus in the journalism cartel’s position - is the fact that Sullivan claims that the First Amendment requires that public officials have a high hurdle to cross to be able to sue for libel.

That is a flaw, because in fact the First Amendment and the entire Bill of Rights as a whole were deeply conservative in nature. The Bill of Rights had to be ratified, or the whole legitimacy of the ratification of the Constitution would have been destroyed. Accordingly, nothing in the BoR was designed to change any right, but precisely to prevent change in any right which was recognized at the time. And the right to sue for libel was such a right.

That is, if you want to argue for the Sullivan position, you have to do so on the basis of pre-constitutional law. A breezy reference to “freedom of the press” is inadequate.

[Colonelbuzzsaw]

President Chester A Arthur, stalwart Republican, VP of the murdered James Garfield signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act into law in 1883. I believe that is the true beginning of the Administrative State. Prior to that, even minor government jobs were treated as patronage. A new party wins the White House and the new President could/would fire everyone hired by the previous occupant. The very reason Garfield was murdered was due to Charle Guiteau being denied a patronage job when he felt he deserved it.

[VRW Conspirator]

Love it. But the “state” is codified and ensconced in the Federal and States budgets. IIRC, 2/3’s of the Federal budget is about giving money to individuals, Social Security, Medicare, etc. It will be a long and uphill series of battles.

[Hebrews 11:6]

...a powerful administrative state...with millions of career employees, think that they are the decision makers on the domestic and foreign policy fronts. They believe they are entitled to rule us....there is only one choice: break the state. Devolve it, not only in size, but also its purposes. Get it out of D.C.. Break its power base.

Anyone serious about this had best first understand and internalize the lessons CS Lewis taught about the bureaucratic mind in his favorite of his dozens of books, That Hideous Strength.

[nicollo]

Correct on the civil service, Colonelbuzzsaw, but ProgressingAmerica is right to point to the TR progressives who thought that “experts” could run the country from the railroads and factories down to the local drug store or small farm.

The conceit of the progressives and their “rational” or “scientific,” as they pretended it to be, governance is enormous — and dangerous.

[ProgressingAmerica]

One of the things we need to be very careful of is assigning ideological underpinnings to an otherwise bad policy.

Bad policy can be just that- bad policy, and nothing more.

Otherwise we end up accepting the “truths” that the progressives have set out for us, such as for one example that judicial activism begins with Marbury v. Madison.(it doesn’t)

Some people will tell you that Lincoln was the first progressive because of the wartime income tax that was established. Some people will tell you that Hamilton was the first progressive because he worked toward the first Federal Reserve. You could also make the case that it begins in 1849, that’s when the Department of the Interior was introduced.

Where does progressive ideology begin? It’s not in 1883. You can’t have the “administrative state” without progressivism. These people wrote repeatedly about control, and control is the defining feature of what makes the administrative state so disastrous.

Note that the ICC didn’t become a dangerous behemoth until after 1900, even though it came into being in 1887.

[ProgressingAmerica]

It is a good point that there were commissions before the progressive era began. The issue is always size and scope, but most importantly ideology. There's also the issue of proliferation. Ultimately, where we get to is goals. "Control" is always the goal for progressive administrative state institutions.

Progressives are addicted to commissions, and when we get to the progressive era we see commission after commission after commission after commission after commission - a never-ending barrage of proliferation - that's because progressives don't trust the voters and want some "independent" voice that's not "influenced by politics" to rubber stamp their statist views make recommendations about the best way forward.

The Civil Service Commission was a bad way to go about it, but they were honestly(though mistakenly) viewing this as the best way to solve the problem.

[Paladin2]

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/clarence-thomas-lost-constitution/

“Half of us believe we live under the old Constitution, with its guarantee of liberty and its expectation of self-reliance. The other half believe in a “living constitution”—a regime that empowers the Supreme Court to sit as a permanent constitutional convention, issuing decrees that keep our government evolving with modernity’s changing conditions.”

[nicollo]

Anyone who distrusts the rule by commissions and experts understands that central governance is incapable of truth. (Try going to any local government meeting, you’ll see, much less watching Congres on Cspan.)

Of course there’s a role for experts — that’s why the Founders protected the right of petition. And it’s also why the imbed divided, separated, balanced government in the Constitution.

Hayek, of course, spelled it out beautifully with his notion of the emergent order. But Hayek did not create that idea, he observed it, as did Tocqueville; the American Founding employed it.

My favorite philosophical expression of the power of democratic, open and competitive society — which the progressive rule by “experts” denies — is Milton’s Areopagitica, which argues that, since only God knows the truth, governments must allow dissent in order to better approximate what God alone understands.

[Lurker]

See my tag line.

L