One truth almost universally and uncritically accepted is that the American civil service system implemented by degrees during the early Progressive era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a good thing.  Perhaps now is the time to question the wisdom of government by tenured appartchiks.  Whatever its downfalls, the spoils system at least had the benefit of a thorough housecleaning every four to eight years.  Absent such high turnover, the current system erects a legalocracy of inefficiency behind which anonymous and unfirable cogs operate with impunity for decades and generations.  Without fear of ever being outside the system, government workers themselves have every incentive to complicate that system in their own favor.  Rules become undecipherable, the pace of action becomes glacial, and budgets grow unsustainably large.  Meanwhile, administrations come and go and the bureaucracy continues to grow.

James Taranto has argued that if the ongoing IRS scandal didn’t generate in the White House that it is actually a far worse outcome for Americans than if the President himself directed the targeting of conservative groups.  His point is that if the targeting is spontaneous, then it is indicative that the government itself has become politicized.

A return to the spoils system, admittedly, would not fix that, as almost definitionally such a system is partisan.  But there is a difference between a partisan government that owes allegiance to a temporary leadership and a politicized government whose only allegiance is to the continued growth of government itself.  As Taranto argues, if this is the case then “government itself has become a threat to the Constitution.”

While Democrats generally embrace a larger government, they would be mistaken to believe that they too aren’t in the crosshairs of certain branches of the bureaucracy.  In the realm of Defense the tilt of those who work there has been generally Republican, as that party has been more predisposed to greater Defense spending over the last couple generations.  The entrenchment is so deep that even when a Nobel Peace Prize winning President who ran on a platform of decreased wartime activity finds it difficult to reverse course.  One can’t help but to wonder how much of the argument in favor of opening yet another Mideastern front in Syria came from self-serving bureacrats whose departments and budgets would expand as the result of the military action.

Isolated from firing as they are, civil service bureaucrats are impervious to change.  At worst, they hold the line and wait four to eight years for a change in government.  But they never retreat.  And hence, the apparatchikacy continues to grow.

Returning to Fleming’s question we stumble across the obvious answer, Why does government hate [fiscal] conservatives?  Because fiscal conservatism necessarily means a decrease in the size of government.  And nothing is more dangerous to the bureaucracy that has become the fourth branch of government.  What is scariest is that if the apparatchikacy itself wins in a battle against the citizenry that supports it, then we are no longer citizens, but have instead returned to the days of 1775 where we are subjects of an unelected government.

UPDATE:

A. Barton Hinkle raises the same concern:

” . . . it is not a happy thing to note that the fourth branch of government – the administrative state against which Republican politicians rail – is largely impervious to elections. And that despite the uproar over domestic surveillance, an activity the election of Barack Obama was supposed to curtail, the general consensus seems to hold that such monitoring will continue unabated. Politicians come and go; autonomous agencies and mass surveillance are here to stay. Elections still matter a great deal in the U.S., but they matter now less than they once did – and less than they should.”

* These opinions are my own and not those of the US Army or the Department of Defense.

1.  Are global temperatures warming?

2.  Do the negative consequences of the change outweigh the positive consequences?

3.  Can we do anything that will reverse the change?

4.  Do the positive consequences of the action outweigh the negative consequences of doing nothing?

Notice, the steps have nothing at all whatsoever to do with whether or not global warming is anthropogenic.  The climate’s “naturalness” is actually irrelevant.  If a 10 kilometer-wide asteroid were hurling toward earth at 100,000 km per hour, it would be a completely natural event.  However, just because the meteor wasn’t anthropogenic doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t take actions to deflect it.

Notice also, that we could change question 1 from “warming” to “cooling” and the four-step approach still works.  And quite frankly, cooling is probably a more historically problematic situation.

If the answer to any one of the above four questions is “No,” then we should do absolutely nothing about a changing climate.  If the answer to all of the questions are “Yes,” then, and only then, should we take any actions.

This is not the discussion we have been having for twenty years.  Instead, we have been chased onto an  anthropogenic side path well worn by Rousseauian “modern man is bad” theorists.  The discussion over naturalness is not only, as I have already said, irrelevant, it is also self-destructive, as the question itself presupposes that natural is good and that anything that deviates from it must be returned to a state of nature.

RELATED:

Peter Ferrara:  Global Cooling is Here

But here’s where Noonan gets it wrong.  Right in the last paragraph:

“Again, if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now—if the internal corruption within it is not broken—it will never stop, and never be broken. The American people will never again be able to have the slightest confidence in the revenue-gathering arm of their government. And that, actually, would be tragic.”

Actually it wouldn’t be “tragic” if the American people were not to have confidence in this or any arm of their government.  It would be exactly what the Founders called for.

My favorite quotation from the entire 85 editions of the Federalist Papers is this one from Federalist 25 by Alexander Hamilton:

“The people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.”

In fact, you could almost sum up the gist of the entire Constitution with that single statement, as the Constitution attempted to set up a system where no branch of government was in sole possession of the means of injuring our rights.  How far we have strayed, however, when the wing of the government that determines how much of our labors are to be taken into the Federal trough also inquires about our associations,  our religious practices, and soon, our medical care.

Peggy, you are right to call for a special investigator.  But you are wrong to assert that it is a tragedy if, as a result of this scandal, we no longer have  confidence in the IRS.  The real tragedies would occur as a result of believing that any branch of government was deserving of our unsuspicious confidence.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice is different from the individual state legal codes in the sense that when you are accused of violating it, it is your employer who is going to determine your guilt.  The normal criminal defendant can return to his job–or at least a job–while he awaits trial.  It is not possible that a military defendant could be removed from the service before trial–for to do so would punish his pursuit of career advancement were he to be found not guilty.  Furthermore, were defendants to be deprived of their livelihood while they awaited military trial by court martial, they would be deprived of their livelihood just by being accused.

To those conservatives who decry this condition, imagine this unfortunately all too plausible scenario:

A Coyote News reporter hot on the trail of a controversial secret Administration program to support rebels in a far-off land discovers classified documents that shows that those rebels are in fact terrorist affiliated and that the Department of State knew about it and still provided them with Stinger missiles.  The Administration, afraid of the political fallout were the revelation to become known, charges the journalist as a co-conspirator in the leak.  Were that Coyote News reporter subjected to a criminal justice system that denied him his paycheck while he awaited trial, the mere accusation of criminality could be used to subdue whistleblowers and to punish innocents.

Now sure, there is little doubt that Nidal Hasan is guilty of murdering his comrades.  But we have a system that does not express guilt as shades of grey.  You are or you are not guilty.  And until a jury of your peers finds you guilty, you are presumed innocent.

Trust me, you do not want to live under a system where the yet-to-be-tried are considered to be mostly-guilty and are essentially treated as such.  And trust me, you do not want to live under a government that has even more tools to freeze out those who speak out against it.  In other words: $278,000 is a dirt cheap price for freedom.

Online commenters are outraged.  One said:

“It does indeed take a special person to look at the situation in Oklahoma and immediate wonder “Who’s going to pay for this?”

While I’m pretty sure that “special” was intended snarkily, it does indeed take a special kind of person to wonder who is going to pay for this.  And thank goodness Senator Coburn is that kind of person.

The immediate response to any tragedy is to want to help.  And when you are the keepers of nearly $4 trillion budget, it is very easy to wish to throw a few billion at the problem as a genuine gesture of good will.  But the fact is that someone is going to pay for this.  And it very much matters who that someone is.

Should it be the taxpayers, who then don’t have that additional money themselves to spend on their own necessities of life?  A billion dollars of new spending paid for by taxes adds approximately $12 to the tax bill for a family of four.  That doesn’t seem like much, but that’s a billion dollars less spent on food, transportation, and clothing.  Not to mention, what do you do for the next tornado, hurricane, or wild fire.  Is it the taxpayers who should pay for this?

Should the cost be borne by more debt?  That saddles generations to come with the expense, since they will be paying back the billion dollars.  Or since we rarely retire debt, we just roll it over, it might be more accurate to state that future generations will make infinite recurring payments on the billion dollars of debt.  In effect, then, the cost will be diminished future spending and investment.  Is that who should pay to recover from the tornado damage?

Should the burden fall upon current recipients of government spending as Senator Coburn suggests?  If you ask me, that’s a less sympathetic lot than the other two choices of higher taxes or larger debt.  You can’t tell me that any sentient being (which means, apparently, the majority of Americans other than most of Sen Coburn’s colleagues) couldn’t find a billion dollars somewhere in the federal budget that couldn’t stand to be trimmed.

It’s easy to want to throw money around willy-nilly at problems but it really does take a special person to ask the uncomfortable but important question:  ”Who is going to pay for this?”

It makes you look like a fool, much like the President made himself look like a fool when in the space of a single sentence he contradicted himself when he said of the arrest of a black Harvard professor: we don’t yet know the facts of the case, but the police acted stupidly.

We don’t yet know enough of the facts surrounding Benghazi-IRS-AP to really know what happened, certainly not enough to begin saying the I-word.

So when you find yourself about to say the I-word, take Bob Newhart’s advice:

“S-T-O-P . . .  new word . . .  I-T!”

MORE:

Da Tech Guy agrees:  The Impeachment Trap.

If it gets to the point where what we know is that damning, it will be Democrats who will be screaming the I-word so as to distance themselves from crimes.  Until then.  Stop it!

UPDATE:

Rep Chaffetz and National Review’s Andrew Johnson:  Stop it!

Tim Dunkin:  Stop it!

Sen Inhofe:  Stop it!

Pamela Geller:  Stop it!

But it’s not who you think it is.  The year was 1920 and the two men were Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.  Aside from the date and the location, there are other parallels too.  And they speak more about us than they do about either Sacco and Vanzetti or the Tsarnaev Brothers.

The nineteen-teens and twenties was a period of great tumult in the United States.  After the First World War, which was widely viewed as disastrous mistake for having gotten involved, Americans rejected all things associated with the outside world.  The aftermath of the Great War brought upheaval to Europe.  Replacing failing empires and monarchies was Russian communism, German socialism, and varying amounts of anarchy seemingly everywhere else.

Today there is the ongoing collapse of the Euro and the demise of Middle Eastern strongmen, and so we fear radical islamism and economic contagion from Cyprus and Greece.

Eight decades ago the end of the war brought economic troubles too.  High unemployment, which was widely and mistakenly thought of as a normal post-war adjustment to a lack of military demand and a surplus of returning soldiers, was actually just a result of the post-war continuation of the ongoing de-agriculturalization of the world economy.  Regardless of the cause, greater unemployment turned American workers against more recent immigrants who were looking for work too.  In 1917 America passed its first immigration restriction laws barring the entry of “idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, alcoholics . . . ” and Asians.  Just a year before, an influential eugenicist wrote The Passing of the Great Race that became widely popular.  By 1924 America had its first immigration quotas that attempting to freeze in place the country’s racial composition.

Today unemployment is higher than normal as the world deals with the  fallout associated with becoming a post-manufacturing economy.  Pat Buchanan hawks The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.  Politicians from all sides rail against “illegal” immigration but very often demagogue all immigration.

Both periods were characterized by big fights over petty tangential issues that  many prudes insisted contributed to unrest and crime.  The Volstead Act passed in the wake of the 18th Amendment gave us Prohibition, while today the President and many Democratic leaders want to outlaw guns.  Were those laws to pass, more, not less, crime would be the result, just as more crime was the result of Prohibition too.

Certainly I could carry the parallels further, but let me just conclude with a few questions:

• Was it really necessary to quarantine an entire city to capture a couple criminals whose bombing victims numbered one-one-thousandth of those killed on 9/11?
• Does it not speak volumes about the limits of power and the power of people that the police were unsuccessful during their hours of uninhibited manhunt, but as soon as the house arrest was lifted a citizen found the suspect?
• Is it realistic to expect that among millions of immigrants there won’t be a few criminals, when we have millions of native Americans locked up here at home?
• Is not labeling violence as “terrorism” or “an act of war” just another form of “hate” crime, which attempts to characterize criminals by their thoughts instead of their acts?
• If three dead bombing victims is enough to rescind an American citizen’s constitutional rights, is two?  Or one?  Or none?

The anti-impoundment act passed with the 1974 budget.  Like so much legislation that came out of the immediate post-Watergate era, this attempt to neuter Nixon left long term negative consequences for the nation.  From 1803 to 1974 presidents had the power to spend UP to what was budgeted by Congress.  They couldn’t spend more, but if circumstances dictated, the could spend less.  Thomas Jefferson was the first president to use the power when he decided not to buy boats that Congress had authorized to patrol the nation’s western frontier on the Mississippi River after his purchase of Louisiana made naval riverine patrols unnecessary.  For the next seventeen decades presidents underspent their budgets.  Even big spending presidents like Lyndon Johnson routinely spent only 95% of what was authorized.

Since 1974, however, every dime is spent.  Anyone who has spent a late September working for the federal government knows the rush to spend wastefully as the waning hours of the fiscal year wind down.  That is because Presidents can no longer spend less than what was authorized by Congress.  No business would dare operate in such a manner.  So why does government?

You might remember that two years ago, I advocated that President Obama seize the opportunity to challenge impoundment.  My advice still stands.  This is a good thing for the nation if the chief executive has it within his power the ability to properly execute a budget.

That being said, for all the sturm and drang over a paltry 2% cut that leaves 2013 budget still greater than was spent in 2012, the secquester isn’t that bad.  Yes, the brunt of the cuts falls on defense.  So?  Quite frankly, it’s not nearly enough.  And if there’s that much waste in DoD where I work, I’m sure I could find even more in the other departments.

Here’s the problem for those on both sides of the aisle.  Nearly everybody to the right of Paul Krugman acknowledges that federal spending has to come down.  But when it comes down to making actual cuts, it’s always going to be easier to find 51% support for any program than there it is to just make across-the-board cuts.In a perfect world, we would target entire agencies and programs for closure.  (I propose a LIFO rule:  last-in, first-out; first to go Obamacare, Homeland Security, Medicare Part D, then the Departments of Energy and Education . . . )  But we don’t live in a perfect world.

I’ve seen this drama play out in a small way at EUCOM where we tried to trim staff, but in doing so, actually added bodies.  Cuts only came when they were mandated across the board.  It’s just the nature of bureaucracy that every department, agency, or directorate can argue successfully for more, even while it recognizes the existence of excess across the entire enterprise.

So let sequestration happen.  Who cares who gets the blame.  If anything, I’m blaming Republicans for not making the sequester cut deeply enough.

MORE:

Similar thoughts at NRO.

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference – see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states

He’s cherry-picking.  But, okay, I’ll play his game.  Let’s stipulate that Mr. Hartmann is correct and that the Second Amendment was designed by Southerners to prevent the possibility of armed slave insurrections.

Okay, but if that’s going to be your position, then you must recognize that the Constitution also specifically treated slaves as non citizens, and thus, the Second Amendment offered slaves no Second Amendment rights.  And who was hurt by that most?

Yes, that’s right, those who were legally prohibited from owning guns were powerless to resist their own government’s laws that were used to oppress them.

Thank you, Thom Hartmann, for so eloquently pointing out that our own nation’s history shows examples of the evil that can befall individuals at the hands of the government when they are denied Second Amendment rights.