Posted by
VBushmills on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 5:13:13 PM
In several earlier posts we've mentioned that elected officials need to fear the people or they will never keep their oaths and promises.
But what about the un-elected bureaucrats and other paper-hangers and factotums for the political class? They don't answer to the people...really.
Well, in a way they do, and there is plenty of precedence for just how this little known fact is proved.
Ostensibly, under our constitutional framework, public bureaucrats work for The People, the taxpayers who pay their salaries, but in truth, everyone knows they don't. In a perfectly managed government structure there is supposed to be a trickle-down fear, since the people frighten the elected representatives, who in turn frighten the bureaucrats, who get their money and their missions through them.
But that hasn't been the case in most of America since the Great Society. It never was in Cleveland.
Under socialism, as we are about to find out, even the pretense of working for or serving The People is no more. The charade is over, bureaucrats work for the State, which, under socialism is a completely different, and much higher, organism than it ever was under democracy.
If you think this is a big weight off the shoulders of bureaucrats, being able to shed the hypocrisy of pretending to give a damn about The People...it is. But therein lies a danger, for that safety net works only so long as the socialists stay in power.
What we learned inside the old Soviet bloc is that bureaucracy will grow even more quickly and become more intimate in the daily lives of The People once in total control. While every communist office and workplace had photos of the national and state leadership hanging on wall, or on billboards, or on buses, who people feared (and hated), only in an indirect sort of a way, and everyone whispered in hushed tones assuming secret police, the Stasi, or their snitches, were everywhere listening in...the face of socialism they knew most intimately, and hated most were those little weasels-of-people assigned to run their neighborhoods and apartment complexes, or running every little local office for every state department every citizen had to visit once or twice a year to get a signature here, or a stamp there for no discernible reason, other than to keep count...of something. It was always "bring these papers, or those papers", and it was usually two, maybe three trips, before you brought the right papers the first time. Like Caesar Augustus, they were always counting something.
When communism fell in the early 90's a few leaders (Ceausescu of Romania) were hauled out and shot, a few more were tried and imprisoned. Some were exiled. Almost all were shunned and ostracized.
But thousands upon thousands of those petty up-close-and-personal bureaucrats who had made life miserable for the millions of their drones simply disappeared. Some were found hanged, or shot, but most simply disappeared. When I first visited the Balkans in the mid-90s, families were still looking for lost members. It was much worse in Russia, where nameless people learned how to make people become a mere "statistic" many years before.
A lot of scores had been settled. But there was no lament.
Yes, Virginia, even in America, bureaucrats have much to fear...if they behave as bureaucrats without a tether.
Vassar Bushmills