June 28, 2023

All of a sudden, I am reading a bunch of attacks on the administrative state.

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From American Greatness, Theo Wold on “A Century of Impotency: Conservative Failure and the Administrative State.”

From the Daily Skeptic, Eugyppius on “The ‘Soft’ Tyranny of the Bureaucratic State” in Germany.

And on his Substack, Richard Hanania on “The Humble Capitalist.”

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Okay. so what is prompting this? The glorious failure of the administrative state during COVID, you think?

Theo Wold revives the age-old theme of conservative failure against the liberal juggernaut. He proposes James Landis as the guy that helped expand the administrative state during FDR’s first term, and thus “brought to fruition Woodrow Wilson’s progressive intellectual project: rule by experts, insulated from the popular will.”

The various efforts to reform the administrative state have failed. So Wold believes that conservatives must propose deconstruction of the administrative state, and end the “rule by experts.”

At The Daily Skeptic Eugyppius details the recent failures of the German administrative state: tinkering with rail fares, EV subsidies, mandatory consumer conversion to heat pumps, imposing bans on school trips in hot summer weather, lockdowns, and mass vaccinations. It’s as though the bureaucrats think of their citizens as “Administrative Man” where “everybody is more or less the same, subject to nudging via the same incentives, requiring the same protections from the same risks, and likely to benefit from the same one-size-fits-all solutions.”

Richard Hanania has a problem with a conservative outfit, American Compass, that seems to argue that market results can be suboptimal, especially when foreigners are involved. So just assume their “writers know how to allocate resources better than the market can.” In fact, even though administrative meddling doesn’t work, “most people support big government and central planning, because they’re not smart enough to understand the case for freedom.”

The problem for conservatives is dealing with the Churchill quote after World War II: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” For the last century liberals got to write the history, and there is no end in sight. The Great Depression? Evil speculators did it. The New Deal? It saved America from disaster. World War II? It saved the world from fascism. Race relations? Liberals saved us from Jim Crow southerners and now white racists everywhere. Reagan and Thatcher? They gave us neoliberalism that hollowed out the economy. Great Recession? Greedy bankers did it. COVID? Get that Trump behind the tree.