I was pondering all the SWAT teams proliferating under Obama. The FDA has one. The Consumer Safety and Product whatever has one. The Department of Agriculture has one.
What does a SWAT team give you? The power to scare people.
And I got to thinking too, that once you have a Commissariat of some sort–let us say the Food and Drug Administration–it can be counted on to justify its existence by finding problems even where they don’t exist. And what do the SWAT teams do? They rehearse scenarios in which they are needed, in which SWAT really is an appropriate response. Since such scenarios are far-fetched, they define down what constitutes a need for Special Weapons and Tactics, as opposed to an unarmed official knocking on the door with a clipboard.
What exactly do Homeland Security agents do? They are apparently agents who are not TSA, not Secret Service, not Coast Guard. Well, among other things, they justify their existence. They create problems where none existed. They dumb down the situations in which they are needed; they expand the scope of their operations.
The thing about bureaucracies is that they metastasize always and everywhere unless they are carefully regulated. Anyone wanting to squelch American liberties has only to create enough of them, and overfund the rest, and simply wait.
We are reaching a point where everybody feels the need to keep a look over their shoulder, at least in the most Regressive States, lest they violate some norm they didn’t even know they were being held to.
This post was provoked by this article: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/19/what_a_horrible_mother_moms_arrested_for_leaving_their_kids_in_the_car/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
Edit: Here is another example:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/exclusive-new-fed-rules-nypd-training-101-article-1.2192488
When they call Peter Zimroth a “monitor”, they should use the word “Commissar”. When there is some fucking asshole telling you every fucking minute about what you need to do and how, you are living in a Commissariat. I am mildly–only mildly–redefining it.
And I would add as well that the closer the center of decision making is to the individual, the more complex the social order, because they more decisions that get made. The farther that decision moves from the individual, the less decision making they do, and it makes them stupider, because they don’t learn from experience. It also, in a formal sense, reduces complexity.
Socialism is rows of trees–the same trees–all planted in a row. They call this order. Liberalism and Free Markets are forests, which is a complex order. The latter is vastly more resilient, and interesting.