Federal Spending Expands Governance by Bureaucracy

Personal Freedom and Power 108:  Freedom in Decline

But back in the 1960’s when I began, it seemed to me that we’d begun reversing the order of things – that through more and more rules and regulations and confiscatory taxes, the Government was taking more of our freedom. I went into politics in part to put up my hand and say, “Stop!” I was a citizen-politician, and it seemed the right thing for a citizen to do. 

I think we have stopped a lot of what needed stopping. And I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts.

President Ronald Reagan

 Unfortunately, the United States Government in the 20th and 21st Centuries has greatly increased taxes, government debt and bureaucratic control, which decreases the power and opportunity of all Americans.  Freedom and the economic benefits of a free society are in decline and in peril.

 

Federal Spending Expands Governance by Bureaucracy

Jay Ambrose, in Real Clear Politics, proclaims government spending enlarges the bureaucratic state, which diminishes personal freedom.  He is correct.  From America’s founding attempts have been made to control spending.  Ambrose writes:  First in the Constitution, then in various laws and such devices as a debt ceiling, we Americans keep trying to keep the federal government from disastrous excess.

President Obama’s budget increases the debt by a trillion dollars for each of the next 10 years.  The debt and this gigantic increase threaten peace and prosperity in America.  Ambrose cites an equally dangerous by-product, the administrative state – governance by bureaucracy.

It is the growth of an immensely powerful, anti-democratic administrative state that tethers our freedoms through never-ending regulation while vastly diminishing … a very real and crucial part of much of the best to be found in us.

The administrative-state has enacted over 163,000 pages of rules and regulations controlling “We the People.”  Recently, the Obamacare legislation granted immense authority to Health and Human Services to write rules, grant waivers and impose fines.  In effect, Health and Human Services controls the health care of every American.  Ambrose writes that Congress:

 …  passes laws that leave details to bureaucrats, including thousands of new regulation-pages already drawn up for Obamacare.

The administrative-state confiscates our property (income) and rules how we live.  America is no longer the free, inventive and self-sufficient society created by our Founders and admired by Alexis de Tocqueville in his great book, Democracy in America.   

As President Reagan observed   … back in the 1960’s when I began, it seemed to me that we’d begun reversing the order of things – that through more and more rules and regulations and confiscatory taxes, the Government was taking more of our freedom. I went into politics in part to put up my hand and say, “Stop!” I was a citizen-politician, and it seemed the right thing for a citizen to do.

Only a consistent and strong citizen outcry against excessive taxation and oppressive rules will restore limited government and freedom.