Politicians, Bureaucrats and Citizens

How do the politicians and bureaucrats, perceive the citizenry? Paying lip service to their role as "public servants," especially at election time, public officials, in reality, scoff at any such notion. In their eyes, the citizens are means, not ends, who exist solely to ensure the preservation of the bureaucracy.
This philosophical perspective — that the citizen is merely a "cog in the wheel" which can, and will, be sacrificed for the greater good of the bureaucracy — holds true, of course, with the civil bureaucracy. Usually under the guise of fighting some domestic "war," or attacking some "crisis" — poverty, drugs, illiteracy, racism, or whatever — the civil bureaucracy exercises ever-increasing control over the lives and wealth of the citizenry.

But the same holds true with the military bureaucracy. No matter what the conditions are in the world — even if peace were to break out everywhere — even if democracies were suddenly found in every nation on earth — even if every nation's politicians and bureaucrats appointed every ruler in the world — in the mind of the military bureaucrat, crises and wars will always be a "potential threat" to "national security." And so the military bureaucracy also wields ever-increasing control over the lives and wealth of the citizenry.

All money which government has, of course, comes from the citizenry through the coercive process of taxation. Government officials understand that, in this sense, they are parasitic — that is, that they survive and flourish through the earnings that are sucked out of the pockets of the citizens. They comprehend, for example, that if the citizenry suddenly decided to stop paying taxes, the bureaucracy's lifeline would, at the same time, dry up.

The bureaucracy recognizes that, since it is a parasite, it must perform a masterful balancing act. On the one hand, it must ensure that the citizenry continue paying taxes at such a level that the bureaucracy is preserved, and hopefully expanded. But it must also ensure that the level of confiscation and plunder never gets so high that the worst fear of the bureaucracy — a tax revolt among the citizenry — materializes.

The heart of the solution is to make the individual in society once again sovereign over the state. Until citizens "we the people" make the preservation of the individual, as well as his liberty and property, the highest political end, they will continue living their lives in subserviency to what has been the highest political end in the 20th century: the preservation of the bureaucracy and the discord, misery, impoverishment, and destruction which it has brought in its wake.
Extracted from:
The Preservation of the Bureaucracy by Jacob G. Hornberger, February 1991