COLUMN: Bureaucracy, anarchy and the lost Constitution

Anarchy and bureaucracy are virtual opposites, but they are also in a very real sense best friends that feed off each other in unexpected ways.

Let’s think about it.

Anarchy is a state of disorder brought about by lack of government, whereas bureaucracy is a state of disorder brought about by too much government.

Although disorder would be considered a bad thing by most people, it is actually a benefit for those who know how to use it to gain power — and both bureaucrats and anarchists do. Maybe that’s why our Founding Fathers went to so much trouble to tether government to a specific and finite dimension. Alas, that tether was ripped apart long ago, putting the country in a death spiral of ever bigger bureaucracy striving to tamp down ever greater anarchy. The two opposing sides chew up the Constitution while the rest of us are left teetering on the brink of chaos.

It’s easy to see how bureaucrats can consolidate their power with the growth of anarchy, isn’t it? When life on the street is out of control, or perceived as out of control, then “the people” will demand more government to protect them. Therefore bureaucrats can use anarchy to expand their own control.

But interestingly, anarchists can also obtain their own goal of lawlessness by putting so much responsibility on government that it is inevitable that it will fail. The power that anarchists crave is the power to do whatever they want while someone else pays for it.

The classic example of this is the far-left Cloward-Piven strategy of 1966 that called for overloading the public welfare system to the point where it would be impossible for the government to afford it, leading to a collapse that would result in the implementation of a new system altogether — in particular, a guaranteed minimum income for all people, whether they worked or not.

Since then, the “progressive” left has learned to follow the same strategy in every aspect of government. Thus, Obamacare overloads the federal government with the impossible task of ensuring health care for everyone. The real goal, as everyone knows, is for the system to collapse and be replaced by a single-payer system, again taking the burden off individuals and putting it on the government.

This may seem counter-intuitive to what we consider to be anarchy, but let’s face it, what anarchists mainly want is to be free to do anything — and one way to ensure that is by making sure all their needs are met by the nanny state. Free food, free health care, guaranteed income, and of course free college. Thus, again, we discover the nexus between anarchy and bureaucracy — a nexus which virtually defines the Democratic Party.

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton tell their voters that they are going to solve the problems of “the people” with the hammer of government. Only trouble is ... hammers are not tools designed to fix things. They can build things or they can smash things.

When you use the hammer of government to build a program to pay for college tuition, for instance, you are not going to fix anything. Instead you are going to build another government bureaucracy to drain more taxpayer money to throw at another problem that — in fact — government created in the first place.

How did government create the high cost of higher education? That’s easy. First by regulating every inch of every campus where federal money is accepted. Every time a new education regulation goes into effect, you can bet that on average it costs a reasonably large college several hundred thousand dollars at minimum. Considering that there are thousands of regulations that have been imposed on college campuses, the net drain on higher education reaches well into the billions. Who do you think pays for that? Students, of course.

But even more detrimental to the cost of higher education was the decision of Congress to get into the business of paying for individual students’ college costs by getting into the financial-aid business. As soon as the federal government guaranteed that students would be able to meet the burgeoning costs of education, guess what? Colleges raised their costs even more.

There is no free market anymore — and thus no reason for colleges to keep costs down. Students don’t go to colleges they (or their parents) can afford, but rather they go wherever they want to go and pay with phony student-loan money that shows up magically in their bank accounts and which doesn’t have to be paid back for dozens of years — maybe never! The student-loan bubble is just getting started, but when it pops, it’s going to be so loud and so explosive that no college campus will ever again be able to be considered a “safe zone.”

This is just one more example of the institutional insanity that has replaced constitutional common sense. But remember, there is a destructive feedback mechanism in place that ensures that disorder will always prevail.

We are currently in the phase of building up the financial-aid bureaucracy, but when the current $1 trillion in student-loan debt grows to the point where it cannot possibly be sustained by current income levels, the whole shebang will crash down amid charges of bureaucratic incompetence.

That’s when our anarchist friends will demand free tuition, and begin the latest round on the squirrel wheel that we mistakenly call a democracy, but should more accurately identify as a catastrophe.