The slow suicide

In Robert Heinlein's novel, "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress," the revolution-leading professor tells his fellow revolutionary a story of a government functionary:

"Manuel, once there was a man who held a political make-work job like so many here in this Directorate, shining brass cannon around a courthouse."

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"Why would courthouse have cannon?"

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"Never mind. He did this for years. It fed him and let him save a bit, but he was not getting ahead in the world. So one day he quit his job, drew out his savings, bought a brass cannon – and went into business for himself."

It is no secret that working for the government has a corrosive effect on the employee. The great Ludwig von Mises wrote the seminal work on bureaucracy back in 1944, demonstrating how the absence of the laws of supply and demand and the abolition of the profit motive in the government's non-Smithian virtual world brings about perverse institutional goals severely at odds with those common to private corporations and individuals.

These perverse institutional goals instill a warped mindset in the employee, where financial and other resources appear out of nowhere by some inexplicable magic, a mystical largesse to be distributed from the central locus of power by the managerial elite. This is a fundamentally socialist model – it is no coincidence that Hannah Arendt damned the banality of the National Socialist evil even as C.S. Lewis portrayed the ultimate malevolence as a faceless bureaucracy in "That Hideous Strength."

The government employee's perverted frame of reference, therefore, becomes antithetical to the principles of freedom, liberty and limited government that are enshrined in the American Constitution and the Republican Party platform. And yet, the Republican Party leadership – selling out its principles in the pragmatic pursuit of temporal power – has been steadily increasing the population of those most likely to be hostile to the party's stated goals.

When George Delano took office in 2001, government employees at federal, state and local levels consisted of 18.9 percent of the national labor force. Three years later, in 2004, that percentage has increased to 20.1 percent, an increase of 670,000 government workers in a time when total employment has dropped by almost 3 million.

While government's percentage of the labor force is still lower than it was in 1994 – when men were men, women were women and Republicans took out a Contract on big government – at 20.8 percent, at the present rate, it will not take long to surpass that figure. Government employment is expected to grow 2.62 percent in the first quarter alone, adding 562,000 more employees, creating nearly as many government jobs in three months as were created in three previous years.

These numbers might seem insignificant in a nation of 300 million people. But when you consider both the close margin of the 2000 presidential election as well as the fact that only 106 million people voted, the potential for future disaster becomes clear. We are not talking about butterfly wings and hurricanes here, but rather, large turbines and a stiff breeze.

This is not to say that every government employee checks his brain and his principles at the door when he punches in for the first time. But long-term steeping in the morass of bureaucracy, at any level, will have an insensible effect on most individuals over time, and one that is highly unlikely to lead toward supporting republicanism.

In pursuing pragmatism over principle, Republicans are unwittingly sowing the seeds of their destruction as a party in both ideological and practical terms. The ideologists of liberty – columnists such as Joseph Farah, Ilana Mercer and myself – have already left for freer pastures in the Libertarian and Constitution parties. This may well be seen as insignificant by the Republican leadership – one seldom builds a popular party around intellectuals.

But the practical result of creating more bureaucrats will not be so easily ignored. As the voting population continues to become more dependent upon government paychecks, arguments for reducing government expenditures will become naturally less and less popular. This will pull the Republican Party to the left, reducing the entire political debate to one simple question: Not "Is this right?" but instead, "How much?"

Abandoning one's principles for pragmatism is repugnant, but understandable in an imperfect world. But abandoning one's principles in order to commit a slow and unnecessary suicide is simply stupid.