Amerika

Governance in a democracy is supposed to reflect and carry forward the will of the people. The safeguard against corruption that is supposed to prevent waste, fraud or abuse is the fear of the next election. This works for the politicians. It fails for tenured, unelected, professional bureaucrats. They, like the cockroaches, will survive WW III. The more of your governmental apparatus that is on unelected autopilot; the more corrupt that government will become under democracy. It will eventually become a self-licking dog feces ice cream cone with malice shone towards all who strive athwart its self-indulgent corruption and venal vice.

So just how does an ice cream cone lick itself? It’s a linguistic idiom. Baskin and Robbins doesn’t have another new flavor. The self-licking ice cream cone is an organization that primarily serves to satisfy itself rather than serve a valid public mission. So just how does the figurativeice cream cone self-lick? It happens in three basic steps. We will use the IRS as an example as we walk through each step.

1. The organization monopolizes a necessary public mission. The US Internal Revenue Service is charged to collect the monetary amounts needed to supply ready cash to the US Government. It does not actually still fund the government; we now perpetually borrow those funds. However, the IRS has awesome regulatory harassment and enforcement powers that are useful to politicians that win its allegiance. The IRS remains and gets greater empowerment.
2. The organization uses its powers in a remarkably corrupt fashion. It favors individuals it likes and uses the regulatory powers of state to bedevil those it sees through a less auspicious lens. The IRS would probably suffer a severe loss of power from a repeal of the 16th Amendment. This how they would “hypothetically” respond…
   

   “I am a lowly clerk at the IRS, looking at your application for tax-free status,” said the caller, Bill, from Elizabeth, New Jersey. “I go to your web page to see the goals of your group and one of the goals of your group is to abolish the IRS. You can bet every dollar you got I’m going to go after you and target you and try and end your group and that’s just the way it is,” the caller said.

3. But wouldn’t all that chicanery and thuggish abuse of power leave a paper trail. Nope. The GSA sells shredders. The IRS just takes a few key papers and preserves some organizational security. How do you stop them and make them actually keep records. You have to spend years in court to enforce the mandate that they actually do their job in this regards. Otherwise, the documentation goes straight down Winston Smith’s memory hole.

At the end of multiple repetitions of this three step process by multiple agencies of our unelected government, the citizen discovers something insidious. The citizen votes in the elections that would signify a democracy. Instead, the power and the authority increasingly resides with a number of unelected, unresponsive, uncheckable regulatory hegemons.

Thus, the citizen no longer lives in a representative democracy. There is a new form of government that he experiences in day-to-day life. This would be oligarchical collectivism. That would be exactly the experience of anyone unfortunate enough to have been pulled by their dick through the knothole by the IRS.

Tags: big-government, internal revenue service, taxes