Intellectuals Paved the Road to Serfdom

by James Bovard

In the same way that medieval kings seized any excuse to invade neighboring countries, today’s politicians perennially seek pretexts to further invade citizens’ lives. And there is never a shortage of intellectuals who, like the courtiers long ago, assure their masters that God — or at least social science — blesses their aggression.

The power of the intelligentsia

Inside the Washington beltway, it is bad taste to recognize how federal policy is often shaped by the love of power. Experts and activists persistently overestimate the likelihood of successful interventions because of their starry-eyed assumptions about the political class.  Because political scientists cannot measure power lust, they leave it out of their equations. This makes everything neat and tidy garbage.

The more power that government amasses, the more intellectual homage it receives. Washington experts constitute a Greek chorus that bestows accolades on the Powers That Be. There are now more than 400 think tanks in the Washington area, some of which offer little more than an intellectual version of “rent-a-mobs” of political protestors.

Oppressive regimes buy good reputations as think tanks become “a  muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington,” the New York Times reported in 2015. The Brookings Institution received a windfall from the government of Qatar, which has a dismal human-rights record, to set up a research institute that, according to the Qatar government, would devote itself to “reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones.” After an especially tawdry fixed election in 2011, the Kazakhstan government’s image was burnished by two think tanks on its payroll — the Center for Security and International Studies and the Institute for New Democracies. The Atlantic Council, another prominent D.C. think tank, pockets cash from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and NATO. The Times noted in 2015 that “since 2011, at least 64 foreign governments, state-controlled entities or government officials have contributed to a group of 28 major United States-based research organizations.”

Washington think tanks proliferated at the same time that federal policies became more harebrained. Some think tanks are little more than “cash machines for power” for politicians. Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, commented in 2005: “It is the job of think tanks to create political capital. It is the job of politicians to spend it.” May’s think tank extols politicians who advocate bombing Muslim nations.

The lust for power

The profusion of think tanks and policy wonks spawn the illusion that ideas drive policy in Washington. But in many cases, ideas are simply pretenses to sanctify the pursuit of power. A president or prominent politician knows he can recite bosh and a bevy of commentators will race to praise his courage and vision. For instance, in a 2016 email to Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chief John Podesta, Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, assured him that she was a “loyal soldier” and that “I would do whatever Hillary [Clinton] needs always.” The Washington definition of “independent thinker” is merely someone without a visible receipt for his opinions.

Some think tanks have been fronts for political operatives. Jack Abramoff, the most powerful lobbyist in Washington during the early years of the George W. Bush administration, placed an aging beach lifeguard at the head of American International Center, a think tank he created to funnel money to himself and his favorite causes. The scam was fruitful until Abramoff’s other machinations won him admission to federal prison. Newt Gingrich’s boutique think tank, the Center for Health Transformation, pocketed $37 million from healthcare corporations and industry groups before going bankrupt in 2012 after Gingrich’s presidential campaign floundered. Gingrich used his op-eds and speeches to tout positions favored by his think-tank donors and omitted mentioning who was bankrolling his operation.

Think tanks have done nothing to countervail Washington tendencies that conspire against common sense. As the New York Times’ Mark Leibovich noted, “From the moment Obama secured the Democratic nomination [in 2008], he and his staff were subjected to a frantic frenzy of flattery.” The more applause a politician hears, the more deluded he usually becomes. And the biggest hallucination in Washington is that politicians’ power is a great blessing for America. That assumption would be scoffed at in most places but is greeted with solemn nods in receptions and briefings in the nation’s capital.

The more power politicians capture, the more profitable lying about government becomes. Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, in his famous 1944 essay in The Road to Serfdom, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” showed why, once government acquires vast power, “the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion.” In the same way, Washington is biased in favor of intellectuals who defend torture, illegal government surveillance, and presidential killing sprees.

Loyalty versus reality

Former White House spokesman Bill Moyers observed in 2007: “The further you get away from official Washington, the closer you get to reality.” Rewards go to those who report what politicians want to hear, and political loyalty is infinitely more prized in D.C. than fidelity to facts. As attorney-author Chase Madar observed, “When there is good intel that runs against the political winds, the intel gets politicized. The politics don’t get intelligent.” For instance,  President Obama ignored dire warnings before committing far more soldiers to the Afghan war. Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran noted, “Obama purposely did not read a grim CIA assessment of Afghanistan that found little measurable benefit from the 30,000 ‘surge’ forces Obama eventually approved.”

Bad policies balloon into national catastrophes because politicians ignore bitter realities.  In 1967, the Pentagon ordered top experts to analyze where the Vietnam war had gone wrong. The resulting study contained 47 volumes of material exposing the intellectual and political follies that had already left tens of thousands of Americans dead. After the study was finished, it was distributed to the key players and federal agencies — and completely ignored. At the time the New York Times began publishing excerpts in 1971, “the White House and the State Department were unable even to locate the forty-seven volumes.” New York Times editor Tom Wicker commented at the time that “the people who read these documents in the Times were the first to study them.” Daniel Ellsberg, who helped write the Pentagon Papers and leaked the documents to the press, was stunned by the incorrigibility of U.S. policy. No matter how many Ivy League grads and Whiz Kids were manning the helm, “there was a general failure to study history or to analyze or even to record operational experience, especially mistakes. Above all, effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level, for describing ‘progress’ rather than problems or failure, concealed the very need for change in approach or for learning,” Ellsberg observed.

Paternalist policies are also skewed because federal agencies usually ignore any costs they are not compelled to pay. The Supreme Court declared in 1803 that “the very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury.” But agencies routinely define such injuries to private citizens  out of existence. The history of federal interventions is littered with collateral victims who the government claimed never existed. Instead, agencies boast of money spent and legions of purported beneficiaries and ignore everything else.

Political paternalism

Paternalism presumes that government will serve the people even better than the people could have served themselves. Why? Because government knows best. But this simply means nothing more than “government employees know best.” And why do they know best?  Because they work for the government.

“Honest paternalism” is almost as rare as an honest war. Once the political-bureaucratic class labels vast swaths of people unfit to run their lives, it is almost inevitable that federal policies will be shrouded in deceit and denial. The presumption that some people must forcibly care for other people drives a wooden stake into any hope for honest government. The details of “paternalistic” interventions will be determined by political calculations that have nothing to do with benefiting the American public. Instead, there will be a series of closed door deals — or in the case of the creation of the Obamacare legislation, a secret black box computer program.

Paternalism is fashionable in part because it is self-evident that Washingtonians are superior to the rest of the nation. In reality, federal officials are almost as ignorant of the American people as citizens are of government operations. 

Johns Hopkins University political scientists Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsburg surveyed almost 900 federal bureaucrats, White House and congressional staffers, and other members of the Washington policy community for their 2016 book What Washington Gets Wrong: The Unelected Officials Who Actually Run the Government and Their Misconceptions about the American People. Bachner and Ginsburg noted a “pervasive attitude of smug dismissiveness toward the citizenry and little sense of accountability” as well as a “sense of cultural or intellectual superiority” inside the “Beltway Bubble.” Washington policymakers favor punitive solutions in part because they fail to understand fellow citizens: “Government officials writing rules inconsistent with the life experiences and understandings of ordinary Americans find compliance a problem and resort to harsh measures….  Hence, ‘enforcement’ is a hot topic in official Washington.” 

Washington Post reporter Jeff Guo, reviewing the book, insisted that “a lot of this elitism is probably justifiable” because most of the survey respondents had advanced degrees. Guo asserted that “it should be a comfort knowing that there exists a specialized class of people who have dedicated their lives to understanding the intricacies of, say, tax credits for the poor or the diplomatic intrigues of the Caucasus.” It was unclear whether folks should feel “comforted” before or after being fined or jailed. That review should have included the favorite quote of Washington officialdom from Reagan’s National Security Advisor Alexander Haig: “If you knew everything I know, you’d agree with everything I’m about to say.”

The issue is not whether political appointees have higher IQs than citizens under their sway. Instead, the question is whether their presumed brilliance outweighs bureaucracies’ refusal to recognize or reveal problems and failures. Policymakers must practically be able to see in the dark better than average citizens perceive their own lives. 

Paternalism often presumes that bureaucrats have a stronger incentive to assist people than those people have to take care of themselves. But prevailing administrative routines do not inspire confidence on federal rescue missions. Government programs fizzle dollars in part because officials are spending other people’s money. It was an English proverb 400 years ago that “the king’s cheese goes half away in parings.”

Our caretaker

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” quipped novelist Upton Sinclair in 1935. Actually, a person’s thinking is Washingtonized when he is no longer able to recognize any harms the government inflicts.  Government intervention is a cornucopia for politicians and bureaucrats regardless of what happens to purported beneficiaries. Washington continues becoming richer and more powerful despite — or perhaps because of — the dismal batting average of federal interventions.

American democracy has been betrayed by the experts who claimed that permitting politicians to capture nearly unlimited power would not radically change the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. If people are unfit to care for themselves, there is no reason to presume they are fit to choose caretakers. The doctrines currently driving federal policy almost ensure ever greater degradation of the intended beneficiaries. Token choices on election day will be followed by ever more dictates each day of the year.

Rather than benevolent bureaucracies, we have no-fault pseudo-benevolence. But as American Bar Association president Smythe Gambrell warned in 1955, “By every step we take toward making the government caretaker of our life, we move toward making it our master.”