Who Are Our Public Servants?
As the government shutdown wears on and all these federal employees remain furloughed or working without pay, the pity storm for these poor public servants just gets louder. But perhaps this is a good time to ask ourselves, just who is a public servant and what constitutes public service? On the face of it a public servant is one whose job it is to serve the public, to perform a task that is a benefit to the general public. If we dig a little deeper, perhaps we may think of someone who makes a sacrifice in their private lives to apply their unique skills and talents to serve their fellow citizens. We may even consider the idealized public servant of the revolutionary generation who was to serve for a short time and then go back to private life. That is all good, and in an ideal world, accurate. And a few people in government fit that bill, very few.
Most do not and it has just as much to do with the individual ostensibly serving the public as it does the job they perform. Perhaps the first thing to come to mind when we think of what has become the oxymoron of “public service” is the career politicians who have enriched themselves at the public trough and entrenched themselves in power. It is obvious to any thinking person that the vast, vast majority of our elected officials are interested in serving themselves, not us. Their actions speak for themselves. Their job, the only moral job of any government, is to protect the natural rights of its citizens. But there is no power in that so politicians have given themselves the job of solving all of society's problems and in doing so, guaranteed themselves a perpetual task requiring the accumulation of more and more wealth and power.
But the government shutdown isn't about them, they are still getting paid. It is about the average government worker the average American family spends over $15,000 a year to support. A few of them actually meet the definition of public servant as described above. People that serve in our military are there to protect our rights even though the politicians sometimes give them missions that seem far from fulfilling that task. But what about the rest of them, all those government bureaucrats pushing paper at the departments of agriculture, commerce, transportation, HUD and the IRS? What about those at homeland security, the department of (in)justice and state? Are these public servants?
To answer that question, you need to ask another. What does their job entail? Is it protecting the rights of all or is it distributing stolen money and privilege from one citizen to another? A public servant cannot be a servant to one while oppressing another. When the agriculture department uses stolen money from non-farming Americans to pay farmers not to plant crops or heavily subsidize some and not others, whose rights are protected? When the FDA chooses to approve drugs or criminalize treatments based on lobbying efforts and kickbacks, whose rights are protected? Why must we be humiliated by the TSA when airlines should be responsible for the safety of their own passengers? And whose rights are protected when the FBI and department of justice jail people for “process crimes” as a result of entrapment? What about a business or an individual who needs the government's permission through credentials or regulation just to do their job. Is that not just a way to get more money and power?
I could easily make the argument that the government has abandoned event the pretense of attempting to protect the rights of its citizens. Since the cause of the shutdown is border security, one of the legitimate functions of government that protects its citizens from unwanted invaders, perhaps we should ask whose rights the government has been protecting for all the years this has been a problem. Certainly not the rights of Kate Steinle and every other American citizen killed, raped, assaulted or given a disease by a criminal alien invader. The politicians that created the absurd policy of sanctuary cities to protect these criminals obviously do not care about the rights of their citizens. Giving the IRS the ability to operate without due process, the NSA the unlimited capability to spy on everyone, the ATF the impunity to murder, and burdening our great grandchildren with crushing debt to fund their kickbacks and vote buying, are just a few examples of a government that views its people not as sovereign individuals of value whom they serve but as serfs and slaves whose sole function is to support the power and wealth of the ruling class.
When the government is no longer in the moral business of protecting natural rights and merely becomes the arbiter of privilege among citizens, its power is unlimited. Career bureaucrats whose job it is to distribute wealth and favor to some and punishment to others based not on justice but political expediency or political correctness are the hands and feet of the tyrannical monster. We all talk about abuses of power but if the only power a government worker or elected official has is that necessary to protect our natural rights, there is little opportunity to abuse power; there's just not much power to abuse. However, if the people in government have the power to modify my behavior through force of law, take money from me, determine how and if I can make a living, regulate my access to health care and a thousand other things, abuse will become rampant. A career bureaucrat is even more dangerous than a career politician because there is no accountability or opportunity for removal. They sit there in their ivory towers choosing who to grace with money and privilege and who to reduce to serfdom. There is no public service involved in this exercise of despotism. Pity them no more.
Most do not and it has just as much to do with the individual ostensibly serving the public as it does the job they perform. Perhaps the first thing to come to mind when we think of what has become the oxymoron of “public service” is the career politicians who have enriched themselves at the public trough and entrenched themselves in power. It is obvious to any thinking person that the vast, vast majority of our elected officials are interested in serving themselves, not us. Their actions speak for themselves. Their job, the only moral job of any government, is to protect the natural rights of its citizens. But there is no power in that so politicians have given themselves the job of solving all of society's problems and in doing so, guaranteed themselves a perpetual task requiring the accumulation of more and more wealth and power.
But the government shutdown isn't about them, they are still getting paid. It is about the average government worker the average American family spends over $15,000 a year to support. A few of them actually meet the definition of public servant as described above. People that serve in our military are there to protect our rights even though the politicians sometimes give them missions that seem far from fulfilling that task. But what about the rest of them, all those government bureaucrats pushing paper at the departments of agriculture, commerce, transportation, HUD and the IRS? What about those at homeland security, the department of (in)justice and state? Are these public servants?
To answer that question, you need to ask another. What does their job entail? Is it protecting the rights of all or is it distributing stolen money and privilege from one citizen to another? A public servant cannot be a servant to one while oppressing another. When the agriculture department uses stolen money from non-farming Americans to pay farmers not to plant crops or heavily subsidize some and not others, whose rights are protected? When the FDA chooses to approve drugs or criminalize treatments based on lobbying efforts and kickbacks, whose rights are protected? Why must we be humiliated by the TSA when airlines should be responsible for the safety of their own passengers? And whose rights are protected when the FBI and department of justice jail people for “process crimes” as a result of entrapment? What about a business or an individual who needs the government's permission through credentials or regulation just to do their job. Is that not just a way to get more money and power?
I could easily make the argument that the government has abandoned event the pretense of attempting to protect the rights of its citizens. Since the cause of the shutdown is border security, one of the legitimate functions of government that protects its citizens from unwanted invaders, perhaps we should ask whose rights the government has been protecting for all the years this has been a problem. Certainly not the rights of Kate Steinle and every other American citizen killed, raped, assaulted or given a disease by a criminal alien invader. The politicians that created the absurd policy of sanctuary cities to protect these criminals obviously do not care about the rights of their citizens. Giving the IRS the ability to operate without due process, the NSA the unlimited capability to spy on everyone, the ATF the impunity to murder, and burdening our great grandchildren with crushing debt to fund their kickbacks and vote buying, are just a few examples of a government that views its people not as sovereign individuals of value whom they serve but as serfs and slaves whose sole function is to support the power and wealth of the ruling class.
When the government is no longer in the moral business of protecting natural rights and merely becomes the arbiter of privilege among citizens, its power is unlimited. Career bureaucrats whose job it is to distribute wealth and favor to some and punishment to others based not on justice but political expediency or political correctness are the hands and feet of the tyrannical monster. We all talk about abuses of power but if the only power a government worker or elected official has is that necessary to protect our natural rights, there is little opportunity to abuse power; there's just not much power to abuse. However, if the people in government have the power to modify my behavior through force of law, take money from me, determine how and if I can make a living, regulate my access to health care and a thousand other things, abuse will become rampant. A career bureaucrat is even more dangerous than a career politician because there is no accountability or opportunity for removal. They sit there in their ivory towers choosing who to grace with money and privilege and who to reduce to serfdom. There is no public service involved in this exercise of despotism. Pity them no more.
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