Keep a tight rein on bureaucrats to ensure our liberties remain with us
THERE’S AN IMPORTANT TENET of English law – the basis of jurisprudence in former colonies such as Canada and the U.S., for instance – that says everything which is not forbidden is allowed. The theory is that individuals in society are free to live as they will unless otherwise proscribed by laws that were to be limited in scope and scale.
This is important both in protecting our rights and protecting us from authorities, who have a habit of serving their own needs ahead of the public good. Even a passing glance at human history demonstrates a pattern of corruption and incompetence from the earliest monarchs and church officials through to present-day politicians and bureaucrats, even in so-called democracies such as ours.
Totalitarian dictators and theist states are, of course, even more blatant examples of the worst tendencies of human beings, especially as it applies to governing. But they’re not alone in sending us down a road that sees “everything which is not forbidden is allowed” warping into “everything which is not allowed is forbidden,” whereby we must act and even think only in ways set out for us.
More than an interesting philosophical debate, the sliding down the continuum has a very real impact on governance today. That’s not restricted just to the rapid erosion of civil rights in the ersatz fight against terrorists or other would-be reasons to control the populace. Rather, it’s a fundamental part of determining just how much power we should cede to governments, which have been bloated by decades of mission creep.
The principle that “everything which is not allowed is forbidden” is supposed to apply to governing authorities, to limit their powers in protection of the people and the common good.
That’s the theory, at any rate. Experience has shown us, however, that once politicians and bureaucrats are given the power to decide what is “allowed” or “prohibited,” we’re on the road to tyranny. It is difficult to limit the scope of their power once they’ve acquired any. Democracy is supposed to give us control over government, but in practice we are essentially slaves to the system, which become more entrenched and cumbersome despite the periodic trips to the polls that pass for accountability.
Cynicism about politicians, bureaucrats and the system of governance, we’re told, has many of us turning away from politics. Our distaste for how politics is done is partly to blame for falling voter turnout numbers, especially among young people.
Cynicism, in that assessment, breeds disengagement. Many of us barely take notice. When we do, however, it’s usually because the government has done something even more corrupt and egregious than we’ve come to expect. That’s when we become involved enough to build up enough anger to vote the bums out at the next available opportunity.
Concerns about grasping politicians and power-hungry mandarins/bureaucrats are as old as the system itself, but the growing scale and complexity of our societies have made the issue much more pressing. Throw in the much more recent technological capacity for Big Brother-ism and we’ve got a huge problem in need of tearing down.
The late American academic Judith E. Gruber decades ago identified the threat to democracy posed by bureaucracy – ironically a debate kindled by the election of Donald Trump that precipitated a collision with the so-called deep state, the entrenched bureaucracy, particularly in the intelligence community (themselves part of the race to wipe out our civil rights).
“We live in a democracy. That fact, taught in school and persistently reinforced by political oratory, is a source of pride and satisfaction to most of us. Although we often disagree about what a democracy entails, most people would probably accept the idea that the heart of a democratic political system is control of the government by the governed. In modern, complex democracies complete control is, of course, impossible, but at minimum we expect the popular election of public officials,” she writes in Controlling Bureaucracies: Dilemmas in Democratic Governance, noting the public much more often interacts with bureaucrats and other appointees rather than elected – and therefore nominally accountable – officials.
“Bureaucrats have not usurped this power from elected officials; they have been given it deliberately,” she writes of how we’ve come to this state. “Yet the result of such delegation is that the people making the myriad decisions about who benefits and who is regulated are not voted in and out of office by the citizens they are benefiting and regulating. They are generally people hired on the basis of competitive examinations, promoted on the basis of the judgments of other bureaucrats, and fired only under extreme provocation. How then is their work to be controlled by ordinary people? How can we reconcile the growth of decision making in powerful government bureaucracies with our ideas of democracy and popular control?”
With the growth of freedom-expunging governments and their bureaucracies comes a real threat to the concept of “everything which is not forbidden is allowed.” We see that every day, from the petty policies of local governments to the array of edicts and regulations at the federal level.
In his book, Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy, Georgetown University professor Henry Richardson takes aim at the inherent problems of bureaucracy, arguing the problems go beyond size and outcomes due to their basic ethical flaws. He notes that, while large and complex societies rely on
bureaucratic agencies to implement policies, there is a threat of those within institutions having more power than the average citizen when it comes to making decisions about how to enact policy. This inequality in power is unjustified because it’s undemocratic.
Checks on government power – including their sponsors in the corporate realm – are the first stage to restoring democracy to something resembling the public interest. Eventually, removal and devolution of the many-tentacled monster bureaucracies have become.
Along with “everything which is not forbidden is allowed,” we need to promote the concept of “first do no harm” (primum non nocere), as there’s no Hippocratic Oath for public officials.