How did the American government turn on the people? Murray Rothbard says it started with rules giving government workers independence from elected politicians.
— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) October 11, 2024
After all, if bureaucrats don’t serve the representatives of the people, who exactly do they serve? pic.twitter.com/ozYrYF66Hn
"How the US Government Turned on the People," Peter St Onge, October 11, 2024.
Pendleton Act, 1883
BUREAUCRACY AND THE CIVIL SERVICE IN THE UNITED STATES, Murray Rothbard, 1995. Here is the Mises copy.
As with the economy, the seeds of our political crisis began a hundred years ago in the Progressive era.
The Progressives' big year for taking over the economy was 1913, with the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act.
But the political takeover was earlier — according to historian Murray Rothbard, it began precisely 30 years earlier with something called the Pendleton Act of 1883.
The Act made bureaucrats professionals who are independent of politicians. This was allegedly to fight corruption, but note that a bureaucracy that’s independent of politicians is also independent of voters.
After all, politicians are the only part of the government who answer to voters. So if bureaucrats don't answer to them, who do they answer to?
Simple: they answer to nobody. The government bureaucracy becomes a self-serving occupying army. By design.
Once installed with Pendleton, this independent bureaucracy was, of course, captured by the left — socialists. Because they both wanted the same thing: increased government control.
They began in the Progressive Era with widespread regulations that were billed as “reining in” Big Business but were, of course, written by Big Business, marketed by their paid socialist activists, then implemented by bureaucrats whose funding came from politicians on the payroll — well, the donor lists — of Big Business.
And so was born our Corporatist system — of course, there’s another word for it that begins with F and ends in -ism, but then I’m not trying to get censored.
