I am a bureaucrat. Trust me.

June 11, 5:51 PMDallas Libertarian ExaminerGarry Reed

Previous Next

4 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Dallas Libertarian Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

I'M FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND I'M HERE TO
HELP. Michael D. Brown, Bureaucrat–In-Chief of
FEMA during the Hurricane Katrina disaster, received
a "Heck of a job" from President Bush. So how did that
work out for everyone? (AP Photo)

NOTE: Don't be misled. While illegal immigration and the 2010 census are mentioned, those things are not the subjects of this article. They're just examples. Those issues will be pursued elsewhere and elsewhen.

This is about how people perceive government.

Most Americans, if they're taught anything at all in high school civics classes - assuming that public schools at any level even conduct classes on civics - are fed a politically correct child's cartoon pabulum version of How Our Government Works.

They might be taught How Laws Are Made without ever mentioning backroom deal-cutting or underhanded arm-twisting or midnight pork barrel earmarking or how 99 percent of politicians don't even bother to read the laws they vote for.

Or they might be told how government regulation of our every move somehow protects our rights, or how paying half our incomes to a multitude of bureaucracies not authorized by the Constitution and run by unelected political appointees makes our lives better, or how attacking militarily weak, backward, ignorant countries half way around the globe translates into "fighting for our freedoms" which somehow protects our right to vote for one of the two major candidates they tell us to vote for.

Or maybe they learn that the Constitution is an irrelevant relic that can be brushed aside any time the administration in power wants to brush it.

Then, after people leave school, if they don't self-educate, if they don't read history, current events, ongoing trends, and learn something about logic and reason and conceptual thinking, if they simply swallow the leftwing canon or the rightwing dogma without actually questioning any of it, or latch onto something they vaguely perceive as "libertarian" with no true understanding of what that means, then they are left with no real clue of how to comprehend what's actually going on.

Most people, of course, attain their life's philosophy on the basis of what "feels right" at the moment.

There may be no better way to illustrate this mega split between fantasy and reality than to cite the three following communiqués.

ONE: from a USA Today article headlined, "Hispanic groups call for Census boycott."

A group claiming to represent 20,000 Latino evangelical churches in 34 states is telling undocumented immigrants not to fill out census forms because, "When the Census counts growing numbers of Hispanics, the counts are often used to support crackdowns on illegal immigrants."

While a census spokesperson predictably calls a Latino boycott "misguided and ultimately irresponsible" a Latino spokesperson observes, "it's going to be very hard to reach these individuals and say, 'Trust me.'"

TWO: from a Google Groups discussion forum:

A group member espouses the conventional mainstream middleclass traditionalist plain vanilla pie-in-the-sky good government good citizen civic-minded true believer Peter Public and Polly Platitude position on undocumented immigrants and the 2010 census thusly:

"FYI, they will ONLY be using the short form in the 2010 census and even if you are an illegal immigrant, the census confidentiality laws protect you (ICE will never know), so there are absolutely NO excuses for not completing your census 2010 Census form!"

Remember "confidentiality laws" and "protect you" and "ICE will never know" as you read the following.

THREE: from a New York Times article headlined, "U.S. Accidentally Releases List of Nuclear Sites."

Yes, a document clearly labeled "highly confidential" and containing detailed information on hundreds of America's civilian nuclear sites, programs, reactors and weapons laboratories, complete with maps showing precise locations of fuel stockpiles for nuclear weapons, was posted on the Government Printing Office website.

The most serious disclosures seem to be about the three nuke weapons labs - Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia - and the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee that houses "highly enriched uranium, a main fuel of nuclear arms."

While most of the bureaucratic classes stumbled over themselves to minimize the importance of the foul-up, Steven Aftergood, a security expert at the Federation of American Scientists, "expressed bafflement" at the document's disclosure, calling it “a one-stop shop for information on U.S. nuclear programs.”

The reality is, government cannot stop hacking, cannot stop laptops stuffed with public data from being stolen from a functionary's home or car or prevent it from simply being left sitting on the seat of a commuter train, cannot stop corrupt agencycrats from selling information, and cannot stop the continuously common occurrence of official "whoopsie-daisies."

If America's professional bureaucrats can't even keep "highly confidential" secrets secret, how confident are you that they can keep anything secret?

And, as a direct result, why would you voluntarily tell government anything?