Agencies Are Our Servants and Should Behave as Such
Focusing on the experience of farmers, Michale Walsh illustrates how government-by-bureaucracy is entirely antithetical to the principle of a government for, by, and of the people:
Faceless bureaucrats with guns arriving on your doorstep one fine day in order to investigate a citizen who is not even under suspicion. The Constitution doesn’t matter to them, nor do legalistic protestations, nor simple human decency. No, armed with nothing more than their own impunity, agents from EPA or OSHA or any other federal agency with a SWAT team (which is most of them) can simply make demands on citizens in the name of “regulations.”
It’s a nifty, tautological trick, government agencies have pulled in the United States: Somewhere along the process, we all get to vote on politicians. In progressives’ minds, that makes the government the Voice of the People, and as our duly elected, appointed, or hired “representatives,” they determine what the will and interests of the People are. If you resist when they come to enforce that will and protect those interests, well, then, you’re an Enemy of the People.
Want to resist by legal means? That’s fine. They’ve got the endless resources of the People — even people who haven’t been born, much less voted, yet.
And don’t think this is just a problem with giant federal agencies. Even in the government comedy that is the State of Rhode Island, agencies write their own regulations, work to enforce them, and then stand as the judges when people challenge them. Tax officials pick businesses to target and then forbid them from talking about the extortion (thus keeping us from knowing how common it is) while legislators pass new enabling bills into law without even reading them, partly on the strength of leaders’ leverage with small grants that sometimes end up the pockets of the legislators or their friends.
This is a metastacizing disease that will not going away until We the People cut it out, but in practical terms, we’re probably beyond the point at which that’s possible. After all, start running campaigns against the inside interests, and you too become an Enemy of the People.