{"id":31314,"date":"2015-05-19T01:00:35","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T05:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31314"},"modified":"2015-05-11T22:17:53","modified_gmt":"2015-05-12T02:17:53","slug":"qotd-the-iron-law-of-bureaucrats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/05\/19\/qotd-the-iron-law-of-bureaucrats\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The iron law of bureaucrats"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>I should say I\u2019m no free-speech absolutist. I think the notion that we should treat pole dancing like constitutionally protected speech while we try to ban actual political speech is just one of the loopiest manifestations of our popular confusion over the First Amendment. In fact, government support for the arts doesn\u2019t offend me in theory, it\u2019s just how they do it in practice that bothers me.<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, I cannot stand the way New Class bureaucrats think they must be autonomous from the taxpayers who pay their salaries. Imagine if we lived in anything like the \u201cChristianist\u201d theocracy so many lefties live in quaking fear of. Evangelical bureaucrats would likely fund art they liked. The professional Bohemians would shriek \u2014 with some justification \u2014 that the state was imposing its values on the rest of us. But when those same people are in driving the gravy train, they think there\u2019s nothing wrong \u2014 and everything right \u2014 with imposing <em>their<\/em> values.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, this is a problem that extends far beyond outposts like the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Public teachers\u2019 unions and ed-school priests hate the idea that parents and other taxpayers should have a real say in how education money is spent. Bureaucrats in general have become a kind of secular aristocracy that resents second-guessing by the people who fund their will-to-power.<\/p>\n<p>When voters say that bureaucrats shouldn\u2019t spend money on X, the bureaucrats shriek \u201ccensorship!\u201d But it is only the equivalent of censorship if you work from the assumption that it\u2019s all the government\u2019s money anyhow. As Bill Clinton once said about the federal surplus, \u201cWe could give it all back to you and hope you spend it right.\u201d But if we did, alas, not enough of you would spend it on urophagic art.<\/p>\n<p>Jonah Goldberg, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/418143\/bureaucrats-use-taxpayer-money-subsidize-their-own-values-and-no-one-elses-jonah\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Bureaucrats Use Taxpayer Money to Subsidize Their Own Values \u2014 and No One Else\u2019s&#8221;, <em>National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2015-05-09.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I should say I\u2019m no free-speech absolutist. I think the notion that we should treat pole dancing like constitutionally protected speech while we try to ban actual political speech is just one of the loopiest manifestations of our popular confusion over the First Amendment. In fact, government support for the arts doesn\u2019t offend me in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,84,41,13],"tags":[102,459,186],"class_list":["post-31314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-art","tag-censorship","tag-freedomofspeech"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-894","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31314"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31315,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31314\/revisions\/31315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}