Saturday, March 4, 2017

Origins of the U.S. Kudzu-esque Administrative State



What in the hell has happened to our unalienable rights of life, liberty and property?  What happened to the federalist principles of self-government established in our Constitution?  In today’s America, those unassailable rights are permissible on conditions set forth by federal government bureaucrats and judges.  This isn’t the America of our Founders.  Hell this isn’t America, period.


The Obama administration exposed the hard reality that we aren’t the country we thought we were.  We’ve been slowly transforming into a European socialist welfare state and it’s been going on for a long time.


An article published in Powerline revealed just how this kudzu-like administrative state has grown by spreading its vines into the very fabric of American culture, and as you can expect, this ideology was nurtured in greenhouses of higher learning.  Here is an excerpt:


Studying administrative law in law school, I don’t think we read anything that raised questions about the legitimacy of the agencies giving rise to to it. We took it as a given and picked up the story with the passage of the Administrative Procedure Act in 1946. We should have taken a look at the question of legitimacy in constitutional law, and probably did, though the standard New Deal account I would have received is extremely misleading.
 Exercising executive, legislative and judicial powers, the agencies are a constitutional anomaly. When it comes to a government of limited powers based on the powers allocated and divided among the three branches, the administrative agencies don’t really fit. I am honor bound to add that the Supreme Court doesn’t quite see things my way, although Douglas Ginsburg spells out elementary principles (and cites some relevant case law) in “Legislative powers: Not yours to give away.”


The origins of the American administrative state began in 1857 when Columbia University hired Francis Lieber, a German immigrant, to teach a new discipline called “political science.”  His successor was another imported German, John William Burgess, who indoctrinated a whole generation of Americans into the “virtues” of administrative sciences including Woodrow Wilson.  This new philosophy is alien to American self-governance.   Here is an excerpt from Living Constitution, Dying Faith:


The birth of American political science created a bastion within the academy for the view that perpetual societal improvement is possible and inevitable, partly because of evolutionary unfolding, but partly with the aid of the right kind of superintendence.   The institutional and theoretical departures implied by this view would have made the new political science unrecognizable to the American Founders, whose “new science of politics” had almost nothing in common with it.  It was certainly the case that the new political science, in its dismissive contempt for traditional political philosophy, and unchanging principles of political right, and ideas and institutions from prior centuries, turned its back on the Founders.  For the most part, it still does.  American political science therefore remains almost genetically incapable of understanding the Constitution of the fathers.


So there it is.  Americans have been indoctrinated into accepting an administrative state that is outright hostile to our very essence.  And now that we’re confronted with a kudzu-esque bureaucracy, citizens are beginning to wonder if we have any recourse before we are completely subsumed by this foreign entity.

  Source:


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