It is never a good idea to send the message, as the political class now does consistently, that there are no democratic means by which the people can restrain their rulers. As the (Democrat) pollster Pat Cadell pointed out, the logic of that is “pre-revolutionary.”62
Once you’ve secured the other levers of power, elective politics becomes a kind of sham combat to distract from the real battlegrounds. There are degrees of dissembling: the presidential candidate running as a “fiscally responsible post-partisan healer” provides the cover for an agenda crafted by far more explicitly left-wing legislators, such as Pelosi and Frank. Behind the legislators are the judges, behind the judges the regulatory bureaucracy, and behind the bureaucracy the union muscle: left, lefter, leftest.
Of all the many marvelous Ronald Reagan lines, this is my favorite:
He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and, despite a Democrat-controlled Congress, he lived it. It sums up his legacy abroad: across post-Communist Europe, from Slovenia to Bulgaria to Lithuania, governments that had nations were replaced by nations that have governments.
Today, in Reagan’s own country, we are atrophying into a government that has a nation.
In the eighteen months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, over seven million Americans lost their jobs, yet the number of federal bureaucrats earning $100,000 or more went up from 14 percent to 19 percent.64 An economic downturn for you, but not for them. They’re upturn girls living in a downturn world. At the start of the “downturn,” the Department of Transportation had just one employee earning more than $170,000 per year. Eighteen months later, it had 1,690.65 In the year after the passage of Obama’s “stimulus,” the private sector lost 2.5 million jobs, but the federal bureaucracy gained 416,000.66 Even if one accepts the government’s ludicrous concept of “creating or saving” jobs, by its own figures four out of every five “created or saved” jobs were government jobs. “Stimulus” stimulates government, not the economy. It’s part of the remorseless governmentalization of American life.
What sort of jobs were “created or saved”? Well, the United States Bureau of the Public Debt is headquartered in Parkersburg, West Virginia—and it’s hiring! According to the Careers page of their website: “The Bureau of the Public Debt (BPD) is one of the best places to work in the federal government. When you work for BPD, you’re a part of one of the federal government’s most dynamic agencies
I’m sure. They’re committed to a working environment of “Information, Informality, Integrity, Inclusion & Individual Respect.” In the land of the blind, the five-I’d bureaucrat is king. Alas, no room on the motto for the sixth I (Insolvency). At some point in the near future, Big Government will have reached its state of theoretical perfection and all revenues will be going either to interest payments to China or to lavish pensions liabilities for retired officials of the Bureau of Public Debt.
When the subject of the leviathan comes up, the media and other statism groupies tend to say, “Oh, well, it’s easy to talk about cutting government spending, until you start looking at individual programs, most of which tend to be very popular.”
“Programs” is a sly word. Regardless of the merits of the “program,” it requires human beings to run it. And government humans cost more than private humans. In 2009, the average civilian employee of the United States government earned $81,258 in salary plus $41,791 in benefits.
Total: $123,049.68
The average American employed in the private sector earned $50,462 in salary plus $10,589 in benefits. Total: $61,051.69
So the federal worker earns more than twice as much as the private sector worker. Plus he has greater job security: he’s harder to fire, or even to persuade to take a small pay cut.
Experts talk about the difficulty of restructuring entitlement programs, or of carving out a few billions in savings here and there. But here’s a thought experiment: imagine if federal workers made the same as the private workers who pay their salaries. Imagine if they had to get by on 61K instead of 123 grand.
