To: freematt@coil.com From: Jim Bovard <jbovard@his.com> Subject: Ten Thousand CzarsJuly 16, 1999 SECTION: Viewpoint; Pg. A22 Investor's Business Daily, July 16, 1999
Ten Thousand Czars
By JAMES BOVARD
Few Americans think about the cost of giving bureaucrats more power and trust than to the citizenry. But the cost goes beyond mere inconvenience. It destroys liberty.
You don't need to look any further than the steady erosion of the rule of law that should govern the federal regulators, inspectors, enforcers and tax collectors. The due process clause has been largely swept aside in citizens' dealings with such state ofÞcials.
While courts have created new due process rights for welfare recipients, disruptive school children, even criminal defendants, the rights of farmers, homeowners, parents and businessmen have been shredded.
The federal judiciary has created an overwhelming presumption in the legality of the actions of federal agencies, thus sanctioning many acts by government ofÞcials that once would have been considered outrageous, illegal or unconstitutional.
Government ofÞcials are supposedly so far superior to private citizens, they must be allowed to make up the rules as they go along - or to even change them retroactively.
This is the hallmark of federal environmental policy - such as Superfund's routine ruining of companies and individuals for legal actions committed decades earlier.
Arbitrary power converts government employees into a ruling class. Arbitrary power has become more fashionable as government itself has been exalted.
It is symptomatic of the contemporary attitude toward government that the term ''czar'' now has a positive connotation - be it a ''drug czar,'' ''AIDS czar,'' ''health-care czar'' or ''energy czar.'' Americans of earlier generations would be as shocked by the current adulatory use of the term ''czar'' as contemporary Americans should be shocked of the use of ''fuhrer'' as a compliment for a political leader.
In an 1866 Supreme Court case involving the power of military governors in the conquered Southern states, one attorney declaimed to the court about his suffering plaintiffs: ''So far as constitutional liberty is concerned, they might as well be living under a Czar or a Sultan, upon the banks of the Bosphorus or the Neva, as in this free country.''
In an 1895 case, an attorney denounced a newly enacted income tax as conferring powers on the federal government ''worthy of a Czar of Russia proposing to reign with undisputed and absolute power; but it cannot be done under this Constitution.''
Arbitrary power is the epitome of welfare state fairness and antithetical to the liberty sought by the American Revolution.
But this ''fairness'' vests in some individuals the power to coerce, subjugate, reward and punish other citizens, according to their own whim. The only way that pervasive arbitrary power can be assumed to automatically improve society is to presume that the people who wield that power are vastly morally superior to the victims of that power.
Arbitrary power is the antithesis of equal rights - resting on government employees' right and power to dictate who shall be þeeced, indicted or jailed. When the rule of law so erodes, it harbinges the dark side of the state attracting the dregs of humanity.
During the Spanish inquisition, the central Inquisitorial authority could interfere with and ban any sentence or word in any book. A great number of administrators and censors were necessary for imposing such controls, and the person being censored was forced to pay the cost.
Charles Lea noted in his classic ''History of the Inquisition in Spain'': ''The powers granted to the revisors gave so large an opportunity for oppression and extortion that the position was eagerly sought for.''
Furthermore, such bureaucrats had economic and career incentives to steal and plunder in the name of goodness and religion.
Friedrich Hayek, in his famous essay, ''Why the Worst Get on Top,'' showed why, once government acquires great power, ''the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion.''
Faith in discretionary power means faith in giving government ofÞcials the power to punish whom they please -and assuming that this will make America a better society. Yet, at some point, the sheer number of threats government makes purportedly to protect the citizen destroys the citizen's ''domestic tranquillity.''
This is the vicious cycle of paternalism: The more power the government acquires to control people, the more the citizen naturally fears the government. Not surprisingly, citizen distrust of Washington has risen with each new assault on people's rights by Congress and the bureaucracy.
James Bovard is the author of ''Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State & the Demise of the Citizen'' (St. Martin's Press, 1999). http://www.jamesbovard.com
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