Understanding the Progressive Constitution
During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked to define the particular political philosophy that best captured her political ideals. She answered by...
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Creeping Centralization and its Threat to Liberty
A recent panel discussion at Georgetown’s Tocqueville Forum entitled “The Quest for Community in a Digital Age,” reconsidered the American sociologist Robert Nisbet’s powerful thesis in The Quest for...
View ArticleEquality of Opportunity: The Perpetual Alibi of Bureaucracy
We live in an irreligious age but that does not mean that we hold nothing sacred. We have many sacred cows, whole herds of them in fact; and one of them is equality of opportunity. To question the...
View ArticleThe Professionally Political IRS
The Obama Administration’s now-disintegrating excuse for the IRS’s investigation of Tea Party and other conservative groups is that it was done by career employees and not politically directed. After...
View ArticleThe IRS Politicization Template
The IRS stories keep piling up, on top of the other Obama Administration curiosities. Among all the worthy reading, one recent NY Times article remains the most revealing of the many that might be...
View ArticleHow Bureaucracies Discriminate against Religious Institutions
In light of a claim that the IRS has been harassing religious institutions, I would add an anecdote to further burnish bureaucratic bigotry. For a few months late in the last century, I worked for the...
View ArticleThe False Liberty of the Pop-Cartesians
The destructive urge, said the anarchist Bakunin, is also a constructive urge, presumably because one can, at least in theory, build anything one likes upon a foundation of ruins. The cities of Dresden...
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Counting by Race at Hillsdale
Frederick Douglass Hillsdale College is justly acclaimed for not taking federal funds. The Michigan liberal arts college even employs an attorney to make sure it does not unintentionally receive any....
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Arthur Brooks’ Brotherly Reform
The American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks is probably the most captivating American intellectual leader today on the right. He wows conservative audiences and even elicited a kind word about...
View ArticleThe Problem of Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy helps enable both larger and more left-wing government because that kind of government accords with the preferences of most bureaucrats and makes them better off. Classical liberals and...
View ArticleSolutions to the Problem of Bureaucracy
Responding to my post on the problem of bureaucracy, some commentators asked how to prevent bureaucrats from creating a bigger and more left-wing government. Here are a few solutions: 1. Delegate less....
View ArticleClassical Liberals have to Avoid the Nirvana Fallacy Too
Several commenters vigorously disagree with my proposals to limit the influence of bureaucracy on the grounds that these solutions do not attack the roots of the problem and may create more...
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Ebola’s Bureaucracy Lesson
Questioning the effectiveness of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has become the national pastime ever since two nurses in Dallas became infected with Ebola after following CDC protocols....
View ArticleThe UN’s Failures Show Why the U.S. Is the Indispensable Nation
In the New York Times this weekend Anthony Banbury, a civil servant at the UN, told us why he was resigning. The UN bureaucracy, he has found, is insulated from political control and serves it own...
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Competency in Administration: James Q. Wilson and American Bureaucracy
Ever since the reelection of President Obama, bureaucrats have been behaving badly. Conservatives may have steeled themselves to expect bad performance from bureaucrats at all times; but even fans of...
View ArticleHow to Make the Bureaucracy More Accountable
Jeremy Rabkin has written a fine essay about the continuing relevance of James Q. Wilson’s 1989 book Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. I have been fortunate enough to benefit...
View ArticleBureaucracy and Some Bureaucracy Problems
It’s Bureaucracy’s twenty-fifth birthday. To celebrate, let’s state some basic facts that correspond with James Q. Wilson’s thinking. Americans want a lot from their government. We want more than we’ve...
View ArticleFalling Down
All the participants in this discussion seem to agree that James Q. Wilson’s book, Bureaucracy, still offers valuable insights, a quarter century after its initial publication. At the same time, we all...
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Just Trust the Bureaucrats
Stewart Baker, who often writes as if he never met a bureaucrat or government program he did not trust, is at it again. He notes that a Peter Strzok text has been the object of alarmed concern on the...
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