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The Modern Source of Abusive Power

From The National Review George Will writes Government for the Strongest and Richest [1]

Intellectually undemanding progressives, excited by the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) — advocate of the downtrodden and the Export-Import Bank — have at last noticed something obvious: Big government, which has become gargantuan in response to progressives’ promptings, serves the strong. It is responsive to factions sufficiently sophisticated and moneyed to understand and manipulate its complexity.

Hence Democrats, the principal creators of this complexity, receive more than 70 percent of lawyers’ political contributions. Yet progressives, refusing to see this defect — big government captured by big interests — as systemic, want to make government an ever-more-muscular engine of regulation and redistribution. Were progressives serious about what used to preoccupy America’s Left — entrenched elites, crony capitalism, and other impediments to upward mobility — they would study The New Class Conflict [2], by Joel Kotkin, a lifelong Democrat.

In the 1880s, Kotkin says, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad revenues were larger than the federal government’s revenues. That was the old economy. This is the new: In 2013, the combined ad revenues of all American newspapers were smaller than Google’s; so were magazines’ revenues. In 2013, Google’s market capitalization was six times GM’s, but Google had one-fifth as many employees. The fortunes of those Kotkin calls “the new Oligarchs” are based “primarily on the sale of essentially ephemeral goods: media, advertising and entertainment.”

He calls another ascendant group the Clerisy, which is based in academia (where there are now many more administrators and staffers than full-time instructors), media, the nonprofit sector, and, especially, government: Since 1945, government employment has grown more than twice as fast as America’s population. The Founders worried about government being captured by factions; they did not foresee government becoming society’s most rapacious and overbearing faction.

The Clerisy is, Kotkin says, increasingly uniform in its views, and its power stems from “persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society.” The Clerisy supplies the administrators of progressivism’s administrative state, the regulators of the majority that needs to be benevolently regulated toward progress.

HKO

The progressive shift aiming to empower the average man also sought to empower  the elites and technocrats who felt the common man could not properly understand the needs of a modern society. The power required to run the progressive state was not insulated from the human seduction of power in the private sector, but it was insulated from the accountability.  Given the large changes in commercial enterprises such as Amazon, Apple and Uber, consumers and suppliers have created communities that defy the progressive regulatory state.  The state of modern commerce changes too fast to regulate effectively. Systems such as Uber’s ride rating regulates service far better than Rube Goldberg regulations.

The progressive state now betrays its original ideals and has become the source of abusive power rather than its nemesis.

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