Posted by
David A. Jared on Monday, June 13, 2011 7:00:37 AM
In the interest of full disclosure, let it be known that I was once a tax-payer-supported bureaucrat myself. After 8 years of active duty with the U.S. Army and while working on my undergrad degree, I worked as a police officer--first as a patrolman and later as a criminal investigator. I was "lured" over to City Hall as the "Traffic Safety Coordinator" and "Community Development Director" for a couple of years after which I spent 5 years at a small, Texas Junior College as "Regional Traffic Safety Coordinator." While there, I also designed, developed and obtained certification of that Junior College's Criminal Justice Associate degree program and taught some of the classes myself...all of those "jobs" at taxpayer expense. I'm certainly not claiming that my efforts as a bureaucrat did no material good for those who paid my salary for all those days. Certainly as a police officer I was responsible for getting a large number of criminals off our streets--at least for a time...and that's not exactly a "bureaucratic" job. Also I think I did a pretty good job as a teacher of future law enforcement officers, teaching criminal investigative techniques, ethics and details of the Texas Penal Code among other subjects. Those "Traffic Safety Coordinator" jobs, however, were primarily (though not solely) helping various communities identify traffic safety problems and how to apply for and administer federal government grants to address those problems. As "Community Development Director" my job was almost exclusively applying for HUD block grants. Admittedly, we paved six or seven miles of previously-unpaved streets and replaced water and sewer lines in what were called "low-to-moderate-income neighborhoods," but it eventually occurred to me to ask why a taxpayer in New Hampshire should be expected to help a small, north Texas community pay for such things that he would likely never, ever SEE--let alone receive any benefit from. Eventually, I also asked myself why that same taxpayer in New Hampshire should be expected to pay for installing high-intensive, reflective traffic signs in one or more of those small, Texas communities? It was at that point that I made a conscious decision to leave the bureaucracy and see what was available in the private sector. I was hired by a major oil company where I stayed until my retirement, being productive and actually doing something to HELP the economy of the country instead of contributing to the draining of its treasury. Still, it should be known that I spent the years 1960 to 1980 drawing my salary from one tax-supported entity or another.
That said, I've come to the unavoidable conclusion that MOST of the problems we face have little to do with Republicans or Democrats in elected positions of political authority. It seems to me that nothing much changes, regardless of which Party is running things in Washington. I know of Republican legislators who continually express frustration at this apparent inertia. Few of them, it seems, are willing to actually place the blame where I've come to believe it really lies...with government bureaucracies and bureaucrats.
Let's explore a bit of history to see how this all came about. During the Great Depression, millions were out of work (not as many as are out of work today, oddly enough) and the FDR administration came up with an ultimately idiotic idea. If private enterprise isn't hiring folks, WE, "the government," will. {Click!} What they didn't seem to consider was that the government didn't have any PLACE for these folks to work, so they invented the CCC and the WPA, to name just two programs in FDR's National Recovery Act, or NRA. Another thing they didn't consider was that the government cannot find the money to PAY for these workers without taxing it away from private enterprise, which was poised in 1934 to again start hiring folks. With the government taking out of the economy so much more capital, that recovery was delayed until our entry into WW II, actually PROLONGING the Depression. In the final analysis, only about a quarter-million people found work this way, but it set a precedent for later abuses by government bureaucracies. Too, the WPA and CCC DID build some public works that were useful and of ultimate benefit to the public at large, but the costs were enormous comparied to what they would have cost if built by private contractors because, in the case of the CCC, they not only had to pay the workers, but house, equip, transport and feed them as well and each project they undertook required its own equipment, transportation, housing, etc. I actually stayed in an old, CCC camp at a State park in southern Indiana the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school when I worked there as a lifeguard at a CCC/WPA-built lake. It was pretty primitive. Log cabin housing 30 to 40 people (there were only 4 of us using it that summer.) No heat or air conditioning, no cooking facilities, and a separate building for toilets and showers, deep in the trees and a substantial walk to the beach area where we worked.
In the midst of this, the attitude developed that the more people one supervised or oversaw, the more "important" one became to those who approved one's budget and the bigger the budget, the less likely one was to go looking for a job somewhere else. In short, large staffs provided job security because no politician wanted to be responsible for cutting out peoples' jobs, and the various bureaucracies grew and grew. Where things REALLY began to go off the rails was when the progressives started to take over Congress and began to take upon themselves responsibilities and tasks for which there was no Constitutional basis. The monstrous bureaucracy that was "Health, Education and Welfare" (none of which have a Constitutional basis, by the way since the federal government is NOT empowered by the Constitution to provide people with "health" "education" OR "welfare.") eventually morphed into TWO massive bureaucracies, "Health and Human Services" (whatever those are) and the Department of Education. Each of these cabinet-level bureaucracies' heads felt like he/she simply HAD to have more room, more employees, better equipment, more responsibility and power and, more MONEY.
One outgrowth of this was a late 50's, early 60's decision to build the U.S. Army's Finance and Accounting Center at Fort Benjamin Harrison on the NE side of Indianapolis, Indiana. It eventually became the second largest government building in the world, second only to the Pentagon itself. I happened to be home in Indianapolis on leave after returning from Vietnam in late 1965 over payday. Pay was pretty bad in those days. I think I was making about $3,500 per YEAR, including a housing allowance for my wife and son which was less than $150/month. I went out to that monstrous building to apply for a maximum partial pay to tide me over until I got to my next duty station in Texas. The room I entered was HUGE and contained at least 200 desks, each one occupied by someone typing away on a typewriter. (An interesting side note of no particular consequence to this narrative was that I didn't see a single "Anglo" face in the whole room. ALL of the clerks that were visible were black.) I thought at the time that we must have one civilian clerk in that massive building for everyone then serving on active duty!
'ers
How did we get all these bureaucrats? During the Vietnam era, the SDS'ers, the "flower children," the druggies all realized that they could live fairly comfortably and still promote the socialist nonsense they'd learned in college by gravitating into three, principle areas; entertainment, including TV news, education and the federal bureaucracy. All three require little in the way of actual labor, pay fairly well and afford one an opportunity to promote their crazy, irrational, leftist ideas with little opposition and, in the case of the bureaucracy, almost completely under the radar, so without detection. As these folks rise in the bureaucratic hierarchy, they control who gets the jobs IN that bureaucracy and they've hired people of like philosophy so that now, 85 to 90% of the federal bureaucrats--the "careerists" are Democrats and far-left Democrats, at that. It doesn't matter, therefore, if a conservative is ultimately "in charge" by virtue of being elected. Those he or she supervises have myriad ways and means of thwarting the wishes and even policies of "the boss," and go on their merry way, promoting THEIR ideas of what's right and wrong instead of those who were elected to change the direction of the bureaucracy. Worse yet, these people are all "civil service" employees and virtually IMPOSSIBLE to fire. We'll continue on the road to serfdom (to borrow a phrase) until we can do away with a large percentage of these bureaucrats. Thankfully, lots of them are near retirement. Now, if we can just keep them from packing the bureaucracies with more of the same.....