It's Not Just a Question of Firing Bureaucrats

people need to lose their faith in the Narrative

Donald Trump is promising to fire a bunch of federal bureaucrats if elected president in 2024. Jeffrey Tucker.

As [Trump] approached the end of the first term, he started issuing executive orders to bring the Deep State under control. His idea was to reclassify vast numbers of federal employees as Schedule F, which would allow the president to hire and fire them.

For The New York Times this is not good.

[Trump and allies] “are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025…”

Of course, the whole idea of the administrative state, as formulated and implemented by the Progressive movement over a century ago, was to get rid of the old “spoils system,” under which an incoming president cleaned out the federal bureaucracy and put his own supporters in.

But, of course, the effect of the Progressive movement was to create a Progressive spoils system in which is entire federal bureaucracy is a spoils system for liberals. As Tucker writes:

Under the current system, [the president] simply cannot do his job. Millions of “civil servants” are there to wait it out, push back, ignore, and otherwise subvert every administration no matter what the political vision.

Thus, the solution to our problem is not just to give the president more power to hire and fire bureaucrats. The problem is the whole idea that a government can successfully administer a state: can run a national pension program; can direct the health care of the nation; can successfully relieve the poor. And then there is the whole universe of safety regulations and environmental regulations.

Yes. Regulatory capture is what happens, where the regulators get captured by the interests they regulate — even “good” interests like environmentalists. And there’s not a thing the president can do about it.

Let’s just take one issue: home mortgages. Over 80 years ago the federal government instituted a system of low-down fixed-rate mortgages. But guess, what: low-down mortgages mean that more people can compete to buy houses, and so house prices go up. A lot. You try to get into the home mortgage bureaucracy and change anything.

None of this gets fixed by giving the president more power to hire and fire.

The only way it gets fixed is if a majority of Americans believe that, by and large, government Make Things Worse.

And right now, if you talk to your liberal friend next door, they believe. They believe in the Narrative. You can tell this by the number of people still wearing masks. Now, as I understand it, the science on masks is that they really don’t help. Viruses are too small.

So how come so many people are still wearing masks? Because they believe, and that’s the problem.