[Louis Foxwell]

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[Louis Foxwell]

The first principle of a bureaucracy is to perpetuate itself. Greenfield exposes the evil that thrives just under the skin of government. It intends to destroy all that it touches. We are in the thrall of government that has become our worse nightmare and our greatest enemy.

[Carry_Okie]

It insists that its ends are moral, but as they are not achieved, the true end of control is revealed.

For a bureaucracy, failure justifies more power. Thus means become "The End."

So for example an environmental initiative may be intended to lessen pollution levels on the surface but also rewards environmental groups and consultancies whose lobbying enhances the power and funding of the EPA. On a third level, the EPA now uses the initiative to expand the scope of its authority and request more funding to hire more people in the D.C. pecking order between government agencies. On a fourth level, this influences the pecking order within the organization.

To continue (because Greenfield doesn't get it) allow me to quote myself from a dozen years ago:

Both claimant and agent are thus motivated to focus upon those transformation products that are most difficult to control, because it is those properties that are most likely to convert the use of the asset to that which they prefer. The fight between landowners, regulators, and activists then degenerates into increasingly trivial arguments regarding specifications, measurements, and enforcement that have increasingly large financial consequences for the owner. Remedial measures thus structurally diverge from an objective assessment of the total impact upon environmental health because that was never the claimants' primary objective.

Rarely does either acquiring interest consider the possible unintended consequences of their actions, among other reasons because they have little experience in actual operations and no accountability for the consequences. The legal process is thus alienated from its purpose to establish justice, just as the regulatory process is directed away from ecological health. There is little civic accountability for maintaining a successful balance among competing interests, indeed, very likely the contrary is true. Problems are sources of civic claims by which to control the entire economy, a motivational structure antithetical to the very purpose of regulation.

As claims proliferate, the legislatures and courts are overwhelmed with cases that are technical and difficult to prove. They rely upon opinions from supposedly disinterested experts regarding the impacts of transformation products. Neither legislators or courts have the power to enforce a judgement; that power lies exclusively with the executive branch of government. The demand for expediency seduces legislatures and the courts to default upon their Constitutional responsibility, to the only civic agency with relevant expertise and police power. Control of use and, thus ownership of that use, is effectively transferred to the executive branch of government.

When taking land out of production profits the financial sponsors of a claim, it is cheaper to control the target use than to compensate the owner or buy the property. All it takes to manipulate a resource market by democratic means is to buy out the competition by manipulating majority perceptions about the risk of ecological harm associated with that target use. The few who can profit by taking competing resources out of production then have reason to sponsor the investment in political or legal action. They focus the first case against a weak target or obvious problem (which is why most such takings appear as local actions).

Established precedent then extends the applicability of cited legislation and lowers the cost successive claims. Property owners gradually lose their ability to finance the cost of compliance or legal resistance. Absent a profitable use, the market value of the target use approaches zero. After repeated exercise of external controls, purchase of the residual asset value concludes any remaining claim by an owner.

When a rival owner produces a competing or substitute good, the financial advantages of such tacit property acquisitions can be enormous. For example, if a developer funded public concerns about the negatively valued transformation products of farming to render the use of farmland non-economic and ripe for development, the land becomes less expensive to purchase.

This politically-sponsored dissolution of the Separation of Powers Principle, combines all three branches of government into one, that can derive power and funding by manufacturing claims on the use of property. The more externalities are regulated, the more power accrues to the agency to control the use of the producing asset to turn its use to corrupt purpose. When agency control is sufficient to alienate the interest of the agent from the democratic majority, the asset has then degenerated into a socialized commons.

The claims by which a commons is socialized are ironically often the same precedents as were used to extend the original democratic claim; i.e., by extending claims against the transformation products of the democratic use of the resource. With the legal precedents in place that were used to take control of the factors of production on individual property, the civic agent now has the legal tools to take control of ALL related private property. Control of the use of land is now in the hands of an agency that is alienated from accountability to the public claim for healthy ecosystem function. The agency instead serves the limited interests of the politically dominant, who use the power of government to gain de facto control of ALL factors of production.

History teaches that this is not a good thing.

A socialized commons is an evil to the environment because the resource is under a controlling agent with no structural motive to prevent or eliminate ecological problems. Quite the contrary, civic management of the environment not only doesn't work, it has every reason not to work. As ecological problems worsen and resulting economic crises deepen, the power acceded to government agencies expands!

It doesn't matter whether the commons is the environment, childhood education, or transportation, that's how it really works.

[rockinqsranch]

Eliminating the various departments that have been established by Congress under the control of the Executive Branch over the many years would eliminate the need for a vast majority of the bureaucracies in support of those departments, BUT I won’t hold my breath. One would have to have the intestinal fortitude to withstand the racist outcry that would ensue, and I don’t see such a SuperPol anywhere in the mix.

[Carry_Okie]

Forgot to include the source for the above quote.

[expat1000]

The scope of each social problem becomes so limitless that all social problems must merge into a Holistic Socialism of piano wire in which every string touched spreads vibrations everywhere. Solving even the most minor problem requires solving all the problems and the only solution is the absolute power of the system.

This is an astonishing insight into the mindset and tactics of the liberals. You can see it when they go out to protest - at the G8 meeting, right now for example. There are signs protesting everything from Gitmo to nuclear power.

[Vendome]

Property has become a political term that in America just do not fit under our social construct.

The only way to win the war is to steal monies from makers and give to takers.

It’s a term of relative nature and seeks to make everyone the same but, removes personal and properTy rights to achieve it’s aims.

It is amoral and completely wrong.

[marsh2]

We are on a journey now to monetize environmental impact of every use and product. This requires the creation of a public trust “ownership” over every physical thing. Use is seen as an impact for which the public must be compensated through the issuance of allocations and “credits” - which can be traded in exchanges benefitting very rich people.

http://users.sisqtel.net/armstrng/ecosystem_services.htm

The Great Transition - the Great Revaluing - make good things cheap and bad things expensive. Building social and environmental value should be the central goal of policy-making;

the Great Redistribution - redistribution of both income and wealth would create value as resources are moved from those who do not need them to those who do. Goal to share working hours and tasks more equally. Foster a redistribution of ownership to create a form of ‘economic democracy’, where company shares are progressively transferred to employees in a resurgence of mutual and co-operative ownership forms.

Great Rebalancing - markets but where pricing reflects true social and environmental costs and benefits, and a broader definition of “public goods”

Great Localisation moving real power away from the centre to devolved “democratic” (stakeholder) bodies.

Great Reskilling returning to appropriate scale for agriculture, manufacturing and the arts.

Great Economic Irrigation taxing environmental and social ‘bads’ such as pollution, consumption and short-term speculation. consumption taxes reflecting the social and environmental costs of goods

Great Interdependence wealth transfer to developing countries. New Economics Foundation http://www.neweconomics.org/

Stewart Wallis on the Great Transition video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVRD0ZppzRo&feature=player_embedded

[Rich21IE]

ping

[trebb]

Exercising control is an attempt to exert God-like power over others in order to elevate yourself. It is intoxicating and corrupting because they lack the special ingredient necessary to wield that power in a proper manner - humility. Imagine if God was not so humble Himself - no free-will and we become mere puppets, a science project rather than part of a Divine Plan.

[blueunicorn6]

Greenfield is brilliant.

[Billthedrill]

Those interested in this theme might find Milovan Djilas's The New Class worth their while. The author was, at the time of its writing, a Communist, a very senior one: the number three man in Tito's government, a revolutionary, a soldier, and a dissident author fully worthy of consideration alongside Solzhenitsyn. He watched the process Greenfield describes above in the original, and when at last the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, he protested vehemently, was thrown out of government, turned in his Party card, and penned The New Class.

He was jailed later, naturally, eventually for nine years. When it appeared in 1959 it was an international sensation. That got him three additional years.

I shall briefly and crudely describe the process he lays out, and if it sounds similar to Greenfield's, I suspect that is no accident. At first there are the revolutionaries, united in a sense of outrage at social injustice and determined to end it by overthrowing the oppressor, and imbued of an ideology that coalesces them into a Party. Even then there are struggles for supremacy in power, as Marx did in the First International and Lenin in the Second. There is victory - Djilas's would involve fighting the Wehrmacht first - and then the re-writers of history pause. But the dynamic goes on, and a very odd thing begins to happen: internal struggles within the Party for those expressions of power that government office can confer. There is a quiet bloodbath. His involved some 40% of the original revolutionaries and the imprisonment of more. The Party settles into the running of the government, with all the perquisites it can offer. A New Class forms, bureaucratic in nature and murderous in the response to challenges to its power. It is the new Party, very different in nature from the old, and its aim is self-perpetuation and the accession to more power. It has the hereditary characteristics of aristocracy.

This is the reason, says Djilas, that Marx's promise of the "withering away" of the State never happened, even once, in all the implementations of Communism. It is the reason he ceased to be a Communist.

There are obvious parallels to the current soi-disant Ruling Class in the United States. Gone is the innocent idealism, however ill-founded, of the youth of the 70's. What remains is a hard core of amoral, blood-thirsty power-mongers who have every intention of perpetuating their hold on power by means fair or foul, and I do not exempt either of the political parties.

It will fail, and Djilas lived to see it. He died in 1995, having sadly predicted (accurately) the break-up of Yugoslavia and the civil war to come between Serbs and Croats and Albanians and all the other inhabitants of the sad and bloodstained Balkans. "Too much hatred", he said. Too much hatred for a unified nation to survive. I do not like the implications.

[GOPJ]

The problem is there's no incentive to give up power once a goal is achieved.

Martin Buber dealt with this when asked if power was evil. He said good things couldn't happen without power - so it was necessary. But that when the goal was accomplished, people had to drop the power they had accumulated. He's right of course - but how do we create a system that will self destruct ( with the happiness of the creators ) when a goal is accomplished? What would it look like?