What connects the IRS scandal, the Benghazi scandal, the Associated Press scandal, and now the Fox News scandal? The federal bureaucracy has become so large that no one appears to be able to keep it under control.
It is disturbing that the President of the United States first heard that the IRS was targeting organizations based upon their political views on the evening news. Obama claims he was completely unaware of requests for greater security at our embassies and attempts to intimidate the press – issues of significant importance.
We do not expect the president to micromanage the federal government. However, we should expect our government to be transparent enough that our highest elected official is at least aware of issues of major importance. The sheer size and scope of our federal government has led us down the path heading towards total coercion by an army of unelected bureaucrats.
Herbert Spencer, the 19th century economist and political theorist, made it clear that we must establish what the proper role of government is before we embark on policy prescriptions. In the Declaration of Independence, our Founding Fathers said that governments are instituted to secure our unalienable rights.
Unfortunately the federal government has taken on a role much greater than this.
Today’s Washington limits the price at which you can sell your labor. It determines how many miles per gallon your car must get, whether your car has airbags, what size toilet you may have, what your children’s education must entail, what drugs your doctor can prescribe. . . the list is endless.
The vast majority of these laws and regulations reduce our freedom rather than expand it. In The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich Hayek wrote that the role of government is to minimize the total amount of coercion in society, or to maximize your ability to act according to your own plan. For example, a law against theft. In the absence of such a law the thief’s plan is to take your car- and your plan is to keep your car. Obviously both cannot act according to their own plan, so the law is there to minimize coercion and keep the strong from preying upon the weak.
Our federal government is not designed to limit coercion and maximize your freedom. Rather, the opposite is true. Much of what Washington does is to force you to act according to someone else’s plan—the plan of Congress and the bureaucrats. This has resulted in a bureaucracy so large that no one is in control of those with governmental powers.
The acknowledgement of the White House that it doesn’t know what the heck is going on in its own administration should be used as a rallying cry for those who yearn for that freedom for which the signers of the Declaration mutually pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
(Gary Wolfram is the William E. Simon professor in economics and public policy at Hillsdale College and president of Hillsdale Policy Group, a consulting firm specializing in taxation and policy analysis. Originally published on Detroit News.)
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