It’s so easy to complain about the government these days. Particularly the Federal government that has grown in power and reach for the last 100 years. Our Founding Fathers would be horrified by the aggregation of power from the states to the federal authorities. While they saw a need for a federal system of government that was stronger and more effective than what they had experienced under the original Articles of Confederation, their worst fears of Federal overreach would be fully realized in 2023.
They expected the new Constitution they would ratify on 21 June 1788 to maintain not only separate and equal branches of government, but balanced power between the states and the federal government. That balance has given way to dominance by a massive national government that threatens the very idea of federalism, where states would remain empowered to conduct their own affairs while the federal government would be limited in power.
It has not worked out that way at all. Our government today is oversized, overbearing, over-involved in every aspect of our lives, leaving us over our heads and drowning in a sea of government control.
Who do we turn to for relief? We elected members of Congress who declare they will right the wrongs of expansive government. They don’t. We rally to candidates for public office who righteously declare they will reform the government leviathan into a tadpole. They sorrowfully disappoint us. And who is more pleased with this inability than the massive number of bureaucrats who subsist in the everlasting embrace of a burgeoning government complex known as Washington DC?
None are happier than the bureaucrats. Why? Because they are there for life if they choose. Hardly vulnerable to firing even when they are provably inefficient or transgressors against the rights of citizens. What proof? The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) leader, Lois Lerner, who specifically targeted conservative groups to be harassed by the IRS for tax violations during the Obama Administration.
Our Founders never envisioned the federal government becoming so powerful. But across the Atlantic, Charles Dickens warned us as far back as 1857 in his novel Little Dorrit. In sum, the novel satirizes the corruption of huge government and society as a whole. Of interest, Dickens holds out special disdain for the British government in his description of a fictitious “Circumlocution Office.” Here’s how he described it.
The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office.
In other words, the Office of Circumlocution had a death grip on all initiatives, both small and large. Nothing could be accomplished without its consent. It was the ultimate ruler of lives and the arbiter of what was deemed good or bad, often making no distinction between the two, since sorting out virtue and evil was never its purpose. Its existence was to simply stall, delay, obstruct or deny any step in the right direction, no matter how sincere and just an initiative might have been by those seeking its approval. It was the ultimate power broker that determined any activity of government.
Dickens’ choice of the word “circumlocution” to describe his fictional bureaucracy do-loop was perfect. Its definition is the use of many words when fewer will do, placing an emphasis on attempts to be “vague or evasive.” Want proof? Read a bureaucratic regulation and discover for yourself how impossible it is to understand it.
But what is far worse than the confusion our modern bureaucracy creates is its remarkable self-perpetuation. Empowered by the Congress to decide what Congress intended when it passed this or that law, the bureaucratic class has become a government unto itself. It decides what Congress “meant” even when the law didn’t originally mean what the bureaucrats insist it meant. No bureaucrat has ever been elected, yet Congress has by default vested in them the power and funding to control our lives. Dickens’ conclusion of the Circumlocution Office could be ours regarding our own unelected bureaucracy.
“As to the minor priests and acolytes of that temple, the result of all this was that they stood divided into two classes, and, down to the junior messenger, either believed in the Circumlocution Office as a heaven-born institution that had an absolute right to do whatever it liked; or took refuge in total infidelity, and considered it a flagrant nuisance.”
It is time to slay our “flagrant nuisance.”
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