Four Types of Government Operatives: Bullies, Muggers, Sneak Thieves, and Con Men
by Robert Higgs | View comments |
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The beginning of political wisdom is the realization that despite everything you’ve always been taught, the government is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you.
Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer — except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.
— George Orwell, Animal Farm
The beginning of political wisdom is the realization that despite everything you’ve always been taught, the government is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you.
Sometimes government functionaries and their private-sector supporters want simply to bully you, to dictate what you must do and what you must not do, regardless of whether anybody benefits from your compliance with these senseless, malicious directives. The drug laws are the best current example, among many others, of the government as bully. Our rulers presently enforce a host of laws that combine the worst aspects of puritanical priggishness and the invasive, pseudo-scientific, therapeutic state. They tolerate our pursuit of happiness only so long as we pursue it exclusively in officially approved ways: gin, yes; weed, no.
Notwithstanding the great delight that our rulers take in tormenting us with their absurdly inconsistent nanny-state commands, they generally have bigger fish to fry. Above all, the government and its special-interest backers want to take our money. If these people ran a store, they might aptly call it Robberies R Us. Their credo is simple and brazen: “you have money, and we want it.”
Unlike the sincere street criminal, however, the robber in official guise rarely puts his proposition to you in the blunt form of “your money or your life,” however much he intends to relate to you on precisely such terms. (If you doubt my characterization of these intentions, test what happens if you steadfastly resist at every step as the brigands escalate their threats: first ordering you to pay, then billing you for unpaid balances plus penalties and interest, sending you a summons, and ultimately beating you into submission or killing you for resisting arrest. Your sustained, open resistance always ends in the state’s use of violence against you, in either your forcible imprisonment or your removal from the land of the living, after which your memory will be defamed by your designation as a criminal — governments never settle for mere brutality, but always supplement it with unabashed presumptuousness.)
When I say “rarely,” I do not mean that the authorities never carry out their plunder blatantly. Throughout the land, for example, criminal courts, acting as de facto muggers, strip people of great sums of money in the aggregate by fining them for conduct that ought never to have been criminalized in the first place — drug-law violations, prostitution, gambling, antitrust-law violations, traffic infractions, reporting violations, doing business without a license, and innumerable other victimless “crimes.” The predatory judges and their police henchmen care no more about justice than I care to live on a diet of pig pancreas and boiled dandelions. They are simply taking people’s money because it’s there to be taken with minimal effort. In this manifestation, government amounts to a gigantic speed trap.
The more common way for government officials to rob you, however, involves their seizure of so-called taxes, which take countless forms, all of which are purported to be collected in order to finance — mirabile dictu — benefits for you. Such a deal! You’d have to be a real ingrate to complain about the government’s snatching your money for the express purpose of making your world a better place.
Sometimes the “political exchange” into which you are hauled kicking and screaming rests on such a ludicrous foundation, however, that honesty compels us to classify it, too, as a mugging. I have in mind such compassionately conservative policies as stripping taxpayers of hundreds of billions of dollars and handing the money over, for the most part, to rich people engaged in large-scale agribusiness and, sometimes, to landowners who don’t even bother to represent themselves as farmers. The apologies that the agribusiness whores in Congress make for this daylight robbery are so patently stupid and immoral that the whole shameless affair resembles nothing so much as the schoolyard bully’s grabbing the little kids’ lunch money and then taunting them aggressively, “If you don’t like it, why don’t you do something about it?” Every five years, when the farm-subsidy law expires and a new one is enacted, a few members of Congress pose as reformers of this piracy, but truly serious reforms never occur, and even the minor ones that come along from time to time prove unavailing, as the farm-booty interests invariably suck up “emergency relief” payments from the public treasury later on to make up for any shortfalls from the main subsidy programs.
Government sneak thieves, in contrast, fear that they may occupy more vulnerable positions than the agribusiness gang and similarly impudent special-interest groups cum legislators, so they dare not taunt the little kids so flagrantly. Instead, they specialize in legislative riders, budgetary add-ons and earmarks, logrolling, omnibus “Christmas tree” bills, and other gimmicks designed to conceal the size, the beneficiaries, and sometimes even the existence of their theft. At the end of the day, the taxpayers find there’s nothing left in the till, but they have little or no idea where all of their money went. Finding out by reading an appropriations act is next to impossible, inasmuch as these statutes are almost incomprehensible to everyone but the legislative insiders and their staff members who devise them and write them down in a combination of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.
For example, for many years, a single congressman from northeastern Pennsylvania — first Dan Flood and then Joe McDade — substantially enriched the anthracite coal interests of that region by inserting a brief, one-paragraph limitation rider in the annual appropriations act for the Department of Defense. The upshot of this obscure provision was that Pennsylvania anthracite was transported to Germany to provide heating fuel for U.S. military bases that could have been heated more cheaply by using local resources. This coals-to-Newcastle shenanigan was a classic sneak-thief gambit, a thing of legislative beauty, but every year’s budget contains thousands of schemes that operate with similar effect, if not in an equally audacious manner.
Unlike the government sneak thieves, the government con men openly advertise — indeed, expect to receive great credit for — certain uses of the taxpayers’ money that are represented as bringing great benefits to the general public or a substantial segment of it. Surely the best example of the con man’s art is so-called national defense, a bottomless pit into which the government now dumps, in various forms (many of them not officially classified as “defense”), approximately a trillion dollars of the taxpayers’ money each year. The government stoutly maintains, of course, that all ordinary Americans are constantly in grave danger of attack by foreigners — nowadays, by Islamic terrorists, in particular — and that these voracious wolves can be kept from the door only by the maintenance and active deployment of large armed forces equipped with ultra-sophisticated (and correspondingly expensive) equipment and stationed at bases in more than a hundred countries and on ships at sea around the globe.
Without dismissing the alleged dangers entirely, a sensible person quickly appreciates that the threat is slight — just do the math, using reasonable probability coefficients — whereas the cost of (purportedly) dealing with it is colossal. In short, as General Smedley Butler informed us more than seventy years ago, the modern military establishment, along with most of its blessed wars, is for the most part nothing but a racket. Worse, because of the way it engages and co-opts powerful elements of the private sector, it gives rise to a costly and dangerous form of military-economic fascism. Lately, the classic military-industrial-congressional complex has been supplemented by an even more menacing (to our liberties) security-industrial-congressional complex, whose aim is to enrich its participants by equipping the government for more effectively spying on us and invading our privacy in ways great and small.
Worst of all, despite everything that is claimed for the military’s protective powers, its operation and deployment overseas leave us ordinary Americans facing greater, not lesser, risk than we would otherwise face, because of the many enemies it cultivates who would have left us alone, if the U.S. military had only left them alone. (Yes, Virginia, they are over here because we’re over there.) The President routinely declares that the hugely increased expenditures and overseas deployments for military purposes since 2001 have reduced the threat of terrorism, but, in fact, terrorist incidents and deaths have increased, not decreased. Although privileged elements of the political class gain from militarism and neo-imperialist wars, the rest of us invariably lose economic well-being, real security, and all too often life itself. In 2004, people who said that security against terrorism was their top concern voted disproportionately, by an almost 7-to-1 margin, for George W. Bush. They had been conned.
Although the mugger, the sneak thief, and the con man are not the only types of government operatives, they make up a large proportion of the leading figures in government today. The lower ranks, especially in the various police agencies, have a disproportionate share of the bullies. No attempt to understand government can succeed without a clear understanding of these ideal types and each one’s characteristic modus operandi. With this understanding firmly in mind, you will remain permanently immune to the infectious swindle, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” The truth, of course, is the exact opposite: I say again, the government — this vile assemblage of bullies, muggers, sneak thieves, and con men — is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you.
rhiggs@independent.org
http://www.independent.org/review.html
Read more articles by Robert Higgs
I like it! Why don’t so many people get it? Have you read my articles on the Ten Principles of Freedom?
They would at least go some way to sorting out the mess.
And by the way, "political wisdom" is a contradiction in terms - but the irony is wonderful!
Joseph BH McMillan http://www.freedomvrights.com
Comment by Joseph BH McMillan | January 12, 2008
Reading this essay reminds me of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shurgged”. In her essay-novel, Rand described the same dangers of socialist government as this author, but she fleshed these abstract dangers out with names, faces, plot devices, drama, suspense; all the intellectual skills of the philosopher combined with the story telling ability of the novelist. Over the ensuing years, Conservatives and Libertarians have come to acknowledge and honor her predictive skills when it came to describing the predatory ambitions of a massive, central government. But, it seemed to me they somehow always missed her recommended solutions – they came to see the future of government oppression as clearly as she saw it but failed, or perhaps refused, to see her remedies.
Rand built two remedies into her “Atlas Shrugged” plot and even had her character-hero John Galt deliver an extensive soliloquy on the problems and the solutions. Galt and his band of friends/followers had a fully developed philosophy of life which, of course, was Rand’s personal philosophy – but this philosophy wasn’t forced on anyone, people came to it on their own or learned of it from their parents. Unlike our Constitution, Rand’s philosophy was designed to deal with the personal problems and responsibilities of freedom. And, in this novel’s case, her philosophy contained absolutely no moral requirement that Galt and his talented followers work to save the greater society from itself.
Rand’s second remedy in “Atlas Shrugged” was to isolate the people who shared this common philosophy into a much smaller group than the greater society. She did this both physically and mentally – the mental part was where the heroes sought out each others’ company periodically – both for intellectual stimulation and as a means of personal renewal. Rand didn’t portray everyone in the greater society as clamoring for instruction in her philosophy or even being curious about the “virtue of selfishness”. What she was saying is: Not everyone will share my philosophy. What she was also saying is: Adopting my philosophy is not a solution that can be used by a political party or a bi-partisan coalition of elected leaders.
My point here isn’t to defend Rand’s personal philosophy – many thinkers have pointed to and thoroughly analyzed its defects. However, I think her “Atlas Shrugged” remedies are worth examining for their instructive value. Our Constitution wasn’t written to encompass all problems for all time; obviously, the ability to amend it was built in by intelligent men who realized that. However, the changes in our society have come so rapidly we’ve outstripped our ability to continually amend the Constitution so as to truly represent the current wisdom of the common citizen as well as the Founding Fathers. And, unlike John Galt and his compatriots, the common citizens have no philosophy in common to apply to Constitutional questions.
For example, the First Amendment was originally designed, in part, to prevent different Protestant denominations from legally imposing their theology on the new nation. The impetus for that prohibition was rooted in historic and bloody European religious wars following the Reformation.
What possible connection is there between the Protestant Reformation and whether we should teach intelligent design theory or only evolution in public schools? Obviously, there is no intellectual connection, however tenuous, between these two issues – so, we have come to rely instead on living judges imposing their personal opinions in real time on the general public, but always to do so by ritualistically alluding to an old sacred document that may have absolutely no relevance to the issue at hand. And, everything from abortion rights to anti-trust actions follows this same pattern of living judges imposing their personal opinions, through armed force, on a population that believes in ritualistic interpretation of a document that was flawed from the minute it was signed.
There was also no remedy built into the Constitution for incompetence, both narrow and widespread, within the government. The Founding Fathers saw the voters as the management oversight committee who would turn out the “rascals” periodically and replace them with competent and dedicated public servants. But, does this method still work when the government has come to control so many details of our daily lives? Is there any way for voters to learn whether our hundreds of thousands of government employees are acting competently and in our best interests?
If we look at what it means to be an American, we can logically reduce it to “you, or your parents, were born within certain geographic boundaries” or you weren’t born here but some official with delegated legal authority made you an American. Can 300 million people share a common philosophy or common heritage? I think Rand’s argument was absolutely not. Large groups of human beings can’t share anything in common, let alone a complex political philosophy. But Americans are raised within an intellectual tradition that says it’s not only possible they can do so, but that the result of this mass sharing of values is superior to any other method of government.
I think what Rand was saying is that small groups of people sharing a certain philosophy (hers) can produce superior tangible results as well as mental and emotional harmony. But, expecting a large society to freely adopt, understand and carry out the tenets of her philosophy is impossible. We can extend this argument to any political philosophy. When a political group reaches a certain population size, does cohesiveness break down – does government automatically become oppressively socialistic?
So, what is Rand’s solution for the larger society? She doesn’t offer one because she knows there is no solution under America’s traditional form of self-government. We, as a group of 300 million, are doomed to fail with our present system of government, we’re too large and diverse a society to prevent this failure and our government’s incompetence will eventually lead to physical breakdown. “Atlas Shrugged” provided the detailed script for this unhappy conclusion and the chain of events leading to the breakdown. Nor will a widespread public recognition of this governmental incompetence change anything; our government controls the weapons that would bring about any effective remedy.
Certainly not a very cheerful picture and perhaps one that needn’t happen, either in some limited degree or in a full breakdown of society. But, I think her thoughts are instructive and much more relevant to our current problems than anything coming out of the mouths of contemporary political philosophers or presidential candidates.
Comment by Pat Skurka | January 12, 2008
"I think what Rand was saying is that small groups of people sharing a certain philosophy (hers) can produce superior tangible results as well as mental and emotional harmony. But, expecting a large society to freely adopt, understand and carry out the tenets of her philosophy is impossible."
The "solution" to this problem is actually built right into our Constitution in that our Constitution applies to federal government - not state government, county government, city government, town government, etc. The way that our country was designed, each state is essentially its own small, relatively autonomous country, complete with its own government, representatives, courts, and law enforcement. Beyond that, the counties, cities, and townships of each state, in turn, have their own localized governments, courts and law enforcement. People of like political philosophy, or moral philosophy, or religion, or whatever other unifying concept, are more than free to congregate and factionalize in their own local groups. This is why there is a fairly distinct difference in the political, moral, and social climate in, say, San Fransisco California and, say, Spokane Washington. There is no necessity that everyone in the country share an identical political philosophy. If, using the Atlas Shrugged example, all of John Galt's followers congregated in a particular city, that place would naturally have a local government and climate that reflected their philosophy.
Also, as much as a lack of trust of government is necessary and healthy, the entire reason for establishing governments, voluntarily, as we've done here in the United States, is so that people can be protected from having their freedoms and rights infringed and violated by others. Unrestricted and unlimited freedom is actually quite undesirable. The right of one person to not be murdered on the street necessarily means the restriction of another person's freedom to kill them. For that reason, anarchy, or completely unrestricted "freedom" without consideration of the freedoms and rights of others, is a most undesirable and chaotic situation. Regardless of how big and bad the big-bad government is, non-natural monopolies and cartels are undesirable economically speaking, so the freedom to form them has been restricted. Smoking pot, drinking alcohol and taking certain kinds of prescription medication can all have consequences for others if you jump in your car and drive into someone, or negligently cause harm to others due to your impaired condition. So the freedom to purchase alcohol and drugs has been restricted. Some cities and states have public smoking bans because one person's freedom to smoke tobacco may infringe on another person's freedom to breathe comfortably (or at all, for people with certain medical conditions). There are certain necessary restrictions of individual liberty that ensure the protection of the liberty of others. Anarcho-libertarian philosophy would necessarily abolish group rights, sacrificing them to unfettered individual liberty, creating the kinds of conflicts of liberties that I just mentioned. Which presents the anarcho-libertarian with an interesting question: how can we ensure that everyone is experiencing unlimited personal freedom? You can't setup a body to ensure it, that would be a government, which is evil and authoritarian. It's an extremely childish and naive political philosophy centered around the "I can do whatever I want! You're not the boss of me!" argument frequently presented by rebellious adolescents. A more well-thought-out approach is to say, "Yes, you can do whatever you want, to the extent that it doesn't interfere with others doing what they want". And unfortunately, you need someone to be able to enforce rules when you frame the issue that way.
Another key reason for establishing governments is to ensure the security of the collective body of people so that freedoms and rights cannot be infringed by people from outside of the country. Hence the totalitarian institutions of borders and militaries. Debate all you want the validity of the war in Iraq, how to deal with terrorism, or whether the government blows up buildings full of civilians in order to make greedy fat-cats rich (an interesting ethical argument to be made by someone who supports monopolies and cartels), but that is an impossibility in the world in which we now live without a standing army. We no longer live in a time or place where the minutemen can take up their muskets, jump on their horses, and repel an attack at our shores by brigades of soldiers arriving on wooden boats sporting red and blue formal jackets. And we had a standing army then. Regardless of what 9/11 was the "blowback" from (apparently its our "occupation" of Saudi Arabia, which is a well explained theory if you ignore the fact that Al Qaeda has bombed American interests since well before that "occupation" began), or whether or not we have any military stations overseas (those are made obviously unnecessary by simple observation of how peaceful the world was before America began its post-WWII interventionism), it would be extremely difficult to preserve even the Utopian society of free-wheeling rebellious teenagers of anarcho-libertarianism without people whose full-time occupation it is to make sure that nobody can launch missiles with nuclear warheads attached at them, or less elaborately, walk right in and kill them with something as pedestrian as guns and ordinary bombs.
So, happy system-fighting, but I'm not really convinced that your ultimate goal is ideal or practicable.
Comment by Patrick Mulligan | January 13, 2008
What does a dead woman and a popular novel written more than half a century ago say about recent politics that Fred, Hillary, Barrack, Rudy, Mitt or whomever haven’t said already? Relative to my earlier comments on what Ayn Rand could teach us, her unique pragmatism would be foremost – her insistence that reality must always be recognized by the individual and that its converse, willful self-delusion, is the last refuge of the modern “statist”. And, admittedly, that could be an erroneous observation on my part when trying to interpret a philosopher many intellectuals consider a hopeless idealist - someone who refused to recognize the necessary privileges and mandatory functions of modern government.
But today, we could ask ourselves precisely who are the hopeless idealists? Both political Liberals and Conservatives have their philosophical illusions about government. This website is dedicated to exposing the “illusions” Liberals embrace relative to social policy and government functions. However, Conservatives and their cherished illusions are normally given a sympathetic ear, although readers have often engaged in lively debates over the meaning of Conservatism and how its principles should be applied. If the Libertarians (and my sincere apologies to Libertarians, I don’t pretend to be one) could design a rebuttal to Conservative principles based on Rand’s thoughts, what might their objections be?
How about starting with our society’s refusal to change the traditional mechanics of a governmental system based upon a formal social contract – namely our Constitution? Or rather, how have Conservatives refused to recognize the need for periodic systemic change in how government operates – in the details of the ruler’s span of control, in the method of choosing leaders, in the assurance that bureaucratic actions are performed competently and efficiently, and within many other areas?
In reality, our Constitution is a slowly deteriorating piece of parchment housed within the National Archives. But Conservatives have enshrined this document, not only within a sumptuous architectural setting, but also within their political philosophy – and enshrined it as a blueprint that will successfully endure through the centuries – or so we are told.
Given the ongoing changes in our society, either through changes in our citizens’ worldview or changes in science and technology over the last 250 years, is that a realistic concept for maintaining a healthy, functioning government? The Founding Fathers conceived and codified marvelous checks and balances to limit and guide the function of government – but have these checks and balances survived the ensuing decades with their original intellectual vigor and functional utility intact?
One point to consider is that in developing the Constitution the Founding Fathers could envision only those lessons drawn from Western history as of that point in time and from their own contemporary issues – but how could they anticipate technological and societal change as it relates to government in the future? Another problem was the potential revisions needed to deal with slowly changing worldviews? George Marsden, in his book, “The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief” describes how colleges and universities, which were originally founded and controlled by various Protestant denominations, slowly and inexorably slid into the increasingly absurd, post-Enlightenment secularism we’ve grown to know and love.
Not to be left out of the desire to control society, the American Jewish elite gradually modified their religious and ethical concept of tikkun olan from the “right ordering of Jewish society” into “make the entire world a better place through Liberal politics”. In the lust for power, Liberals, and some Conservatives, have found ingenious ways to circumvent the Constitution’s checks and balances – ways that weren’t anticipated in the late 1700’s. When our greater society has refused to change or has changed too slowly for their tastes, the Liberals turned to the courts by executing an end run around existing and traditional functions of government.
And Liberals did this in quite a clever way. Knowing the Conservatives’ intellectual loyalty to the Founding Fathers and tradition, the Supreme Court pretends to find support within the Constitution for their desired legal changes and performs an amusingly ritualistic dance to mollify the Conservatives. The Conservatives either are, or pretend to be, satisfied with the Court’s decisions as long as they are derived using the prescribed rituals. The check and balance process seems stymied by this Liberal parlor trick. Supreme Court justices aren’t elected and they serve for life – but, their function was never envisioned as legislative – so what happened to change it?
And why are we returning to that ancient Hebrew society of rule by judges? There are many answers to this question offered by the elites, although reforming our government’s legal review function relative to the Constitution is never one of them. Why aren’t we directly electing these judges? We elect the President who appoints them and we elect the Senators who confirm them, so in effect our elected employees are simultaneously responsible and yet not responsible for decisions spanning lifetime judicial careers and affecting all of society. The resulting situation is rule by a small elite – we don’t call them Kings or Emperors anymore, but that doesn’t seem to shorten their reign or lift their boot from our necks.
Ayn Rand would point out that rule by an elite is the normal state of affairs under all forms of government – some rulers are called Kings, some Commissars and some Supreme Court Justices – but, regardless of name or pedigree, the final result was always unavoidable given our political philosophy and basic worldview. Certainly physical comfort and material wealth help to soften the blow and pad the yoke around our necks, but there’s no denying the present reality. And, an honest critic would have to ask what role our Constitution actually serves nowadays – or are we just too comfortable to attempt a real change?
Nor would acknowledging this reality result in worthwhile or constructive changes in a society of 300 million. If you have a vested interest in continuing to rule the common citizens, voluntary foundational changes limiting the government’s span of control isn’t within your interest. Contrary to some interpretations of Rand, government may indisputably be a necessary evil, but a government process based on deception and the Conservatives’ trust in an obsolete ideal shouldn’t be a required element supporting this “necessary evil” of government.
And the author of this essay shares a valid point with Rand, we can’t seem to avoid our fate. Whether you live in the Conservative duchy of Montana or the Liberal fiefdom of San Francisco, the present government’s rule is inescapable. It’s a well settled principle that secession based on a Constitutional dispute isn’t an option no matter how many like-minded voters congregate within a geographic area – you could debate that very point with the ghosts of Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln if you like – but, in the here and now, the only feasible answer is a polite, politically correct version of “obey us or we’ll cave your head in.”
Comment by Pat Skurka | January 15, 2008
"Worst of all, despite everything that is claimed for the military’s protective powers, its operation and deployment overseas leave us ordinary Americans facing greater, not lesser, risk than we would otherwise face, because of the many enemies it cultivates who would have left us alone, if the U.S. military had only left them alone. (Yes, Virginia, they are over here because we’re over there.)"
The foregoing is nonsense on stilts. I'd debunk it, but Patrick Mulligan has already beaten me to the punch. Otherise, your typology of "bullies, muggers, sneak thieves, and con men" is useful, notwithstanding the built-in shortcomings of a libertarian analysis.
Comment by Nicholas Stix | January 18, 2008