by Mark Steyn
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.”67
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
Ah, but such fancies dwell purely in the Land of Imagination. In theory, Americans govern themselves through elected representatives. In practice, the political class are no longer the citizen-legislators of a self-governing republic but instead the plump, pampered Emirs of Incumbistan. Hawaii’s Daniel Inouye has been in Congress as long as the islands have been a state, which means he’s been in office longer than the world’s longest-running dictators-for-life. Lest comparisons with Colonel Gaddafi seem a little unkind, Inouye has been in Washington almost as long as the five monarchs of the Kamehameha dynasty ruled over a unified kingdom of Hawaii. If that’s what Hawaiians are looking for in a political system, why bother overthrowing Queen Lili’uokalani? John Dingell Jr. has been a Michigan congressman since 1955. For the twenty-two years before that, his constituents were represented by John Dingell Sr. Between the first Duke of Dingell and the second, the Dingell family has held the seat for a third of the republic’s history. If that’s what Michiganders are looking for in a political system, why not stick with the House of Lords?
The late Robert C. Byrd sat in the Senate for half-a-century while the world transformed, and strung along: a former Klan leader (“Exalted Cyclops”) and recruiter (“Kleagle”) who opposed civil rights, he ended his days as a hero to Moveon.org for opposing the war on terror. He doesn’t seem to have been a principled Klansman or a principled Moveon.orgiast. He simply moved on as required. You gotta know when to change the sheets. He did what was necessary to maintain himself in power. Everything in West Virginia apart from the Bureau of Public Debt and the Klan lodge is named after him. When he turned against the war in Afghanistan in 2002, I suggested that maybe if we agreed to rename the place Robert C. Byrdistan, he might see his way to staying onside for a couple more months. (I’m still in favor of that: his view of power was no less primitively tribal and venal than your average Pushtun village headman’s.) Apart from naming more
Charlie Rangel has been there since 1970. Even his car has been there a long time. Apparently in Congress you’re not meant to keep a vehicle in the House parking garage for more than six weeks without moving it. Rangel parked his Mercedes in one of the most “highly coveted” spaces in 2003, put a tarp on it, and left it there for six years.70 If only we could have done that with him and the rest of the legislative class. The chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means committee, Rangel was the man who wrote the nation’s tax laws yet did not consider himself bound by them. So, for example, he had a rental property in the Dominican Republic but did not declare the income he received from it. Good for him. Would you like to have a rental property in a foreign jurisdiction and keep all the dough to yourself? Too bad. If you were to do it, there wouldn’t be enough money to maintain our rulers in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. Rangel isn’t rich by congressional standards, but he is in the happy position of so many people one encounters in “public service” who rarely if ever have cause to write a personal check. After the congressman’s grotesque selfpitying ululations on the House floor for the injustice of being “censured” for his conduct, Kerry Picket of the Washington Times invited him to imagine what punishment the “average American citizen” would have received had he done what Rangel did. “Please,” the congressman told her. “I don’t deal in average American citizens.”71
If only. Pete Stark has been in the House of Representatives since 1973. For all those decades, he has sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. What’s in there? Let Pete explain it. In 2010, running for his nineteenth term in Congress, Stark was asked about the constitutionality of ObamaCare. He replied: “I think there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life.”72
His lady questioner wanted to be sure she’d understood: “Is your answer that they can do anything?”
Stark responded: “The federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country.”
He’s right. If the Commerce Clause can be stretched to require you to make arrangements for your health care that meet the approval of the national government, then the republic is dead.
What’s the very least that we’re entitled to expect of our legislators? That they know what they’re legislating. John Conyers has been in the House of Representatives since 1965. Like most representatives, he didn’t bother reading the 3,000-page health-care bill he voted for, because, as he said with disarming honesty, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did: “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” sighed Congressman Conyers. “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”73
Okay, so it would be unreasonable to expect a legislator to know what it is he’s actually legislating into law. He’s got wall-to-wall aides to do that for him. When you’re rejiggering more than one-sixth of the economy and incurring massive future debt, that’s the sort of minor task you can outsource to a flunkey. It would be churlish to direct readers to the video posted on the Internet of Representative Conyers finding time to peruse a copy of Playboy while on a commuter flight to Detroit.74 Perhaps if the ObamaCare bill had had a centerfold of Kathleen Sebelius on page 1,872, or maybe a “Girls of the Health & Human Services Death Panel” pictorial ...
Two-thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers plea would still hold: no individual can read these bills and understand what he’s voting on. That’s why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which
But there’s a more basic objection: Conyers is correct. He doesn’t need to read the bill because he is no longer a maker of law. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is two thousand pages, there’s no equality: instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege. One state is treated differently from another, out of raw political necessity. For O
bamaCare, Nebraska got a “Cornhusker Kickback,” but there was no “Granite State Graft” for New Hampshire, because there was no political need for one. Some citizens (i.e., members of powerful unions and approved identity groups) are treated differently from other citizens (i.e., you). It’s not a law so much as a Forbes 500 List, a hit parade of who’s most plugged in to who matters in Washington, with Nebraska senators and UAW honchos at the top, and a loser like you way down at the bottom. And even then, as happened almost as soon as ObamaCare had passed, the un-level playing field had to be re-landscaped with additional hillocks and valleys containing opt-outs for McDonald’s, the United Federation of Teachers, and anyone else powerful enough to get past the Obama switchboard operator.75 So Conyers has to worry only that his client groups have been taken care of: he doesn’t deal in average American citizens, as Charlie Rangel would say. Joe Average and all the rest can be left to the agency of this, the board of that, the commission of the other, manned by millions of bureaucrats whose role is to determine, arbitrarily but authoritatively, which of the multiple categories of Unequal-Before-the-Law Second-Class (or Third-Class, or Fourth-Class) Citizenship you happen to fall into.
The lifetime professional legislative class boasts of its “experience.” Experience of what? Of spending beyond not their means but ours. The Emirs of Incumbistan have presided over an explosion of government, an avalanche of debt, and the looting of America’s future. Robert C. Byrd named buildings after himself; Eddie Bernice Johnson handed out a third of Congressional Black Caucus college scholarships to her own grandchildren and the family of her senior aide;76 Charlie Rangel fiddled his expenses
THE BUREAU OF COMPLIANCE
Behind our left-wing legislators are lefter judges. In a country where every other institution has lost legitimacy, only our robed rulers still command widespread deference. So these days the left advances its causes more effectively through the courts than through elections, for the fairly obvious reason that very few people are dumb enough to vote for this stuff. The judiciary legislates fundamental issues—abortion, gay marriage, illegal immigration, health care—and thereby supplies electoral cover for Democrats. As Nancy Pelosi explained, “It is a decision of the Supreme Court. So this is almost as if God has spoken.”77 So that’s that. Love to help you, says Nancy, take your point, but there’s nothing I can do.
That’s not how Abraham Lincoln saw it: “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court... the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”78
Which they have.
America is unique in this regard. In Europe, if the establishment wants to invent a new “right”—that is, yet another intrusion by government—it goes ahead and does so. If it happens to conflict with this year’s constitution, they rewrite it. But the United States is the only western nation in which the rulers invoke the Constitution for the purpose of overriding it.
What Judge Bolton in the Arizona immigration case and Judge Walker in the California marriage case share with Mayor Bloomberg’s observations on popular opposition to the Ground Zero mosque is a contempt for the
In 2008, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the “Human Rights” Commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me saying, “You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense.”
Made perfect sense. Except that Canada already had a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the “human rights” commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference. Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists—sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, sometimes patrician noblesse oblige statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war western democracies is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: the people can elect “conservatives,” as from time to time the Germans and British have done, and the left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppenceha’penny would agree to go and take the chill off the toilet seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects were ready to stroll in and assume their rightful place. Republicans have gotten good at keeping the seat warm.
Thus, America in the twenty-first century—a supposedly “center-right” nation governed by a left-of-center political class, a lefter-of-center judiciary,
Liberalism, as the political scientist Theodore Lowi put it, “is hostile to law,” and has a preference for “policy without law.”79 The law itself doesn’t really matter so much as the process it sets in motion—or, as Nancy Pelosi famously told the American people regarding health care, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”80 When Lowi was writing in the Seventies, he noted that both the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) were set up by a Congress that didn’t identify a single policy goal for these agencies and “provided no standards whatsoever” for their conduct. So they made it up as they went along.
Where do you go to vote out the CPSC or OSHA?
Or any of the rest of the unaccountable acronyms drowning America in alphabet soup. For more and more Americans, law has been supplanted by “regulation”—a governing set of rules not legislated by representatives accountable to the people, but invented by an activist bureaucracy, much of which is well to the left of either political party. As the newspapers blandly reported in 2010, the bureaucrats weren’t terribly bothered about whether Congress would pass a cap-and-trade mega-bill into law because, if fainthearted Dems lose their nerve, the EPA will just “raise” “standards” all by itself.81
Where do you go to vote out the EPA?
Congress stripped provisions for end-of-life counseling (the so-called “death panels”) out of the ObamaCare bill, but Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, put ’em back on her say so.82 And why shouldn’t she? As Philip Klein pointed out in the American Spectator, the new law contained 700 references to the Secretary “shall,” another 200 to the Secretary “may,” and 139 to the Secretary “determines.” So the Secretary may and shall determine pretty much anything she wants. Plucked at random:The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance.83
“Tooth-level surveillance”: from colonial subjects to dentured servants in a mere quarter-millennium.
Where do you go to vote out “the Secretary”?
And so “We the people” degenerates into “We the regulators, we the bureaucrats, we the permit-issuers, we the czars.” Dancing with the czars is unrepublican. “Ignorantia juris non excusat” is one of the oldest concepts of civilized society: ignorance of the law is no excuse. But today we’re all ignorant of the law, from John Conyers and the guys who make it down to li’l ol’ you on the receiving end. How can you not be? Under the hyper-regulatory state, any one of us is in breach of dozens of laws at any one time without being aware of it. In a New York deli, a bagel with cream cheese is subject to food-preparation tax, but a plain bagel with no filling is not.84 Except that, if the clerk slices the plain bagel for you, the food-preparation tax applies. Just for that one knife cut. As a progressive caring society, New York has advanced from tax cuts to taxed cuts. Oh, and, if he doesn’t slice the plain bagel, but you opt to eat it in the deli, the food preparation tax also applies, even though no preparation was required for the food.
Got that? If you’ve got a deli, you better have, because New York is so broke the
y need their nine cents per sliced bagel and their bagel inspectors are cracking down. How does the song go? “If I can make it there/I’ll make it anywhere!” If you can make it there, you’re some kind of genius. To open a restaurant in NYC requires dealing with the conflicting demands of at least eleven municipal agencies, plus submitting to twenty-three city inspections, and applying for thirty different permits and certificates. Not including the state liquor license.85 The city conceded that this could all get very complicated. So what did it do to help would-be restaurateurs? It set up a new bureaucratic body to help you negotiate your way through all the other bureaucratic bodies. Great! An Agency of Bureaucratic Expeditiousness! And, if that doesn’t work, they’ll set up an Agency of Bureaucratic Expeditiousness Regulation to keep it up to snuff.
In such a world, there is no “law”—in the sense of (a) you the citizen being found by (b) a jury of your peers to be in breach of (c) a statute passed
One morning, I strolled into my office in New Hampshire and noticed a letter on my assistant’s desk from the State of New York’s Bureau of Compliance informing us that we were in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance.
This was news to me. I don’t live in New York, I don’t own a business in New York, I don’t make anything in New York, I don’t sell anything in New York, I rarely visit New York except to fly in once in a while and catch a Broadway show (which I’ll now be doing on its out-of-town tryout in New Haven). Nevertheless, the State of New York had notified me that I was in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance, and apparently the fine for that is $14,000.
