If more Americans knew what Ben Weingarten writes here about bureaucracy — we’d be a lot farther down the road of saving this country:
Expansion of federal agencies’ power over the last century has culminated in the rise of the Deep State, which is seeking to undermine presidential power.
Of all the domestic challenges America faces in government, the administrative state stands preeminent, not only in its size and scope, but in the threat it poses to liberty as such a formidable, fundamentally tyrannical institution. James Madison might as well have been describing the administrative state in Federalist 47, when he wrote: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
A new book, “Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century,” by professors John Marini and Ken Masugi, explores the sprawling federal bureaucracy’s philosophical origins, chronicles its evolution, and provides a compelling argument that the Trump administration is attempting to curtail it. (Disclosure: The authors consulted with me for this book project and I received payment for my work.)
Marini and Masugi have played an outsized but underappreciated role in American political thought, focusing on the theory and practice of the mammoth, ever-ballooning, arguably unconstitutional––and certainly anti-constitutional––bureaucratic morass of which “Unmasking the Administrative State” serves an essential part.
The Fourth Branch of Government
The administrative state is the living, breathing manifestation of progressivism’s “long march” through the institutions. It is, in effect, a fourth branch of government that usurps and combines the powers of the others, leading them to collude in the scheme, in the process corroding themselves.
It consists of hundreds of thousands of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats promulgating millions of pages worth of rules and regulations (read: laws), who––no matter how technically competent and virtuous the drafters might be––represent an affront to republican government and freedom itself. At a micro level, it creates the perverse circumstance in which an individual might find him- or herself up against a single agency playing legislator, regulator, judge, jury, and executioner all at once.
Read more: The Federalist
Image credit: www.thefederalist.com.
