Bureaucracy the Fix Is
In
Daily Observer
Almost at the
beginning there was the little red schoolhouse. Earlier there was a ragtag
group of armed colonists skirmishing with the British to attain an objective. The
objective was a country of free men, and a government dedicate to individual
freedom.
Voluntarism
was the expression of freedom and freedom is the product of voluntarism. The
best efforts, the most beneficial produce, have been the result of the work of
voluntary organizations.
All voluntary
groups had to survive political fires within and outside the organization. They
had to gain community acceptance. They were subject to competition. They became
hardened, annealed by their confrontation with the very people they served.
Early on the doctors organized themselves into a profession, as did the
lawyers, architects and other groups as the need arose.
Now things are
not perfect. Lawyers tend to protect lawyers and doctors tend to protect
doctors. The professions try to protect themselves and so do the volunteer
groups. But ultimately they are vulnerable to the will of the people. They wax
and wane, change their ways for better or for worse and are in constant foray
with or against the public. In other words, professions thrive in the politics
of conflict.
The same is
true of the lawmakers. Through the electorate system they are eventually
responsible to the public and their license can be revoked in an election. In
other words, in this democratic process everybody is accountable to somebody.
A political
system of checks and balances, of independent entities with conflicting
interests set up in opposition to each other in the political arena was
conceived as one of the better ways to preserve what the founding fathers had
in mind. The nation would struggle through the shifting sand of individual
objectives until a consensus evolved, and then for a brief period the nation
would be on firm ground until the objective was obtained. When other
considerations arose or problems developed, back to the shifting sands of
political conflict.
The
government, which ultimately is supposed to represent the will or consensus of
the public, has a unique way of dealing with the institutions that have
developed as a result of the creative works of free men. The government tends
to regulate its free men.
Now this isn’t
all bad. What is bad is the manner in which the government moves into the game.
The governmental referee is the bureaucracy, a static expensive organization of
gargantuan proportions. The bureaucracy with its regulations and its
administrators institutionalizes large chunks of society.
Now there are
certain constitutional safeguards in this. Thus municipal or federal
Jobs prohibit
discrimination which may not be true in the free sector to the same extent or
even at all. But the danger of the introduction of the governmental bureaucracy
into the affairs of men is that it takes larger and larger chunks of our
self-governing system out of the political arena and moves them into the
bureaucratic sector.
This poses
grave dangers in a democracy because the bureaucrat is responsible to no one;
has tenure in the job; is neither voted in or out of office; transcends
administration; and is a permanent fixture/.
A permanent
leader is a dictator. The greater the Bureaucracy grows the smaller the arena
will be left in which to practice politics. This is the clear and present
danger that the nation faces today. Little by little it slips into a corporate
state.
To prevent this
bureaucracy must be subject to review; tenure must be qualified; and ultimately
the bureaucrat, as are our elected officials, must be accountable to the people
they “serve”.