Great excerpts from an October 2010 article by Gary North:
When a pride of lions is waiting patiently in the tall grass for zebras, some zebras are going to get eaten. When we think “bureaucrats,” we should think “lions.” We are zebras.
There will be losses. But the lions are getting old. They don’t run as fast these days. Zebras are multiplying. Think “China.” Think “Russia.” Then think back to Mao and Stalin. If those two concentration camps could collapse without armed resistance or a lost war, don’t tell me about the inevitability of tyranny.
Lincoln Steffens visited the Soviet Union in 1921 and returned to say, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” No, it didn’t. Neither do the mini-despotisms of the various Keynesian utopias. Their employees will not receive those pensions after all.
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Assume that you are Big Brother. You can monitor anyone. You can find out what he owns, what he earns, where he lives, where he works, what credit cards he uses. You have a database on him. Any information that your database lacks can be bought from private database companies.
If you can monitor anyone, you can target anyone. You can bankrupt almost anyone. Just bring a lawsuit against him. His legal bills will bust him. He knows this. He will capitulate. Money talks.
Do you want to set a legal precedent? Target someone with limited financial resources and no connections.
Scholars and journalists who are committed to a defense of individual liberty have collected databases of horror stories on coercive yet legal government invasions of privacy. For every documented story, there are untold numbers of similar stories that never reached the media.
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The Madoff case is classic. All that government regulation, so little awareness! The reports got filed on time. The SEC was tipped off to chicanery. Yet nothing was done. Why not?
Mises told us why not. The government does not know how to price anything rationally. It cannot determine which cases are worth pursuing and which are not. There are no official guidelines that provide insight.
Here is the operational rule. Bureaucrats pursue those cases that justify their continuing employment. This goal includes the survival of their bureaucracies.
Civil Service laws protect most Federal employees. Bureaucratic immunity from budget cuts protects the bureaucracies. So, bureaucrats pick the easy targets in the same way that lions pick zebras: the young, the old, and the sick.
I once read an article about a jet fighter ace in the Korean War. He revealed his secret of success. He would rapidly survey a squadron of MIG-15s, looking for a plane that looked a little wobbly. If he spotted one, he knew the pilot was inexperienced. He went after that plane.
This strategy can make you an ace. It will not win wars. The Korean War ended in a cease-fire. It is still officially going on.
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To run a really successful tyranny, the leaders must have increasing wealth as well as more reliable data. They need wealth to hire the programmers, the data collectors, and the police. Computer costs keep falling, but they fall much faster in the private sector (microcomputers) than the government sector (mainframes).
The government’s computer systems are not integrated. Not even the Internal Revenue Service has a seamless system. (The two greatest lies in computer marketing are these: “seamless transfer of data” and “user-friendly.”)
Yes, governments have access to ever-growing quantities of data. But the public has far greater access to low-cost information that it uses to increase the overall complexity of society. The task of monitoring what is going on becomes ever-more utopian. The government is always falling behind, for the reasons Hayek described. The greater the complexity of society, the less able the State is to monitor it, assess it, and use the data to control it.
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The successful bureaucrat advances up the chain of command by not making a big mistake. The essence of bureaucracy is risk-avoidance. It is slow. It is self-consciously slow. It is defensive. It is always looking up regulations. Its answer to every request is “no.” Why? Because you can retreat from “no” to “yes” if you have to, and no one gets upset. You cannot avoid trouble by moving from “yes” to “no.”
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The ability of the Establishment to maintain its power is dependent on its being able to buy off the voters and co-opt the newly elected representatives. The failure of the economy reduces the Establishment’s ability to hold onto power.
The police State is going bankrupt. It has issued more promises to voters and more promises to pay investors in Treasury debt than it can possibly fulfill. When it goes belly-up, as the USSR did, and as Red China did, the Keynesian system will be exposed as the little man behind the curtain — with a badge, a gun, and a printing press.
A determined herd of zebras can outrun any pride of lions. Eventually, lions will be too weak to run.
Zebras don’t need to kick lions to death. They merely need to run fast.
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The little men behind the various curtains are getting exposed on YouTube. There is nothing they can do about this.
Familiarity breeds contempt. It can’t happen fast enough for me.
(I made similar points in an article here.)