Jonah Goldberg
For understandable reasons, the IRS scandal
has largely focused on the political question
of whether the White House deliberately
targeted opponents. To date there's no
evidence that it did. That's good for the
president, but it may not be good for the
country, because if the administration didn't
target opponents, that would mean the IRS
has become corrupt all on its own.
In 1939, Bruno Rizzi, a largely forgotten
communist intellectual, wrote a hugely
controversial book, "The Bureaucratization of
the World." Rizzi argued that the Soviet
Union wasn't communist. Rather, it
represented a new kind of system, what Rizzi
called "bureaucratic collectivism." What the
Soviets had done was get rid of the capitalist
and aristocratic ruling classes and replace
them with a new, equally self-interested
ruling class: bureaucrats.
The book wasn't widely read, but it did reach
Bolshevik theoretician Leon Trotsky, who
attacked it passionately. Trotsky's response,
in turn, inspired James Burnham, who used
many of Rizzi's ideas in his own 1941 book,
"The Managerial Revolution," in which
Burnham argued that something similar was
happening in the West. A new class of
bureaucrats, educators, technicians,
regulators, social workers and corporate
directors who worked in tandem with
government were re-engineering society for
their own benefit. "The Managerial
Revolution" was a major influence on George
Orwell's "1984."
Now I don't believe we are becoming
anything like 1930s Russia, never mind a
real-life "1984." But this idea that bureaucrats
-- very broadly defined -- can become their
own class bent on protecting their interests at
the expense of the public seems not only
plausible but obviously true.
The evidence is everywhere. Every day it
seems there's another story about teachers
unions using their stranglehold on public
schools to reward themselves at the expense
of children. School choice programs and even
public charter schools are under vicious
attack, not because they are bad at educating
children but because they're good at it.
Specifically, they are good at it because they
don't have to abide by rules aimed at
protecting government workers at the
expense of students.
The Veterans Affairs scandal can be boiled
down to the fact that VA employees are the
agency's most important constituency. The
Phoenix VA health-care system created secret
waiting lists where patients languished and
even died, while the administrator paid out
almost $10 million in bonuses to VA
employees over the last three years.
Working for the federal government simply
isn't like working for the private sector.
Government employees are essentially un-
fireable. In the private sector people lose
their jobs for incompetence, redundancy or
obsolescence all the time. In government,
these concepts are virtually meaningless.
From a 2011 USA Today article: "Death --
rather than poor performance, misconduct or
layoffs -- is the primary threat to job security
at the Environmental Protection Agency, the
Small Business Administration, the
Department of Housing and Urban
Development, the Office of Management and
Budget and a dozen other federal
operations."
In 2010, the 168,000 federal workers in
Washington, D.C. -- who are quite well-
compensated -- had a job-security rate of
99.74 percent. A HUD spokesman told USA
Today that "his department's low dismissal
rate -- providing a 99.85 percent job security
rate for employees -- shows a skilled and
committed workforce."
Uh huh.
Obviously, economic self-interest isn't the
only motivation. Bureaucrats no doubt
sincerely believe that government is a
wonderful thing and that it should be
empowered to do ever more wonderful
things. No doubt that is why the EPA has
taken it upon itself to rewrite American
energy policy without so much as a "by your
leave" from Congress.
The Democratic Party today is, quite simply,
the party of government and the natural
home of the managerial class. It is no
accident, as the Marxists say, that the
National Treasury Employees Union, which
represents the IRS, gave 94 percent of its
political donations during the 2012 election
cycle to Democratic candidates openly at war
with the tea party -- the same group singled
out by Lois Lerner. The American Federation
of Government Employees, which represents
the VA, gave 97 percent of its donations to
Democrats at the national level and 100
percent to Democrats at the state level.
We constantly hear how the evil Koch
brothers are motivated by a toxic mix of
ideology and economic self-interest. Is it so
impossible to imagine that a class of workers
might be seduced by the same sorts of
impulses? It's true that the already super-rich
Kochs would benefit from a freer country. It's
also true that the managerial class would
benefit from the bureaucratization of
America.
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