During the Obama administration, and especially the last five years after the passage of Obamacare, we have seen numerous attempts, some successful and others still in the process, to impose more Federal top-down regulations on all sorts of human activities.  Besides Obamacare and its 15,000 pages of regulations, we have the massive regulatory scheme flowing from the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, various new power plant emissions rules, Internet regulation straight out of 1938, mileage standards for vehicles, endless talk about restrictions on campaign giving and speech (thankfully, the FEC knows it cannot do anything—yet), the EPA’s new “groundwater rules” which potentially give it jurisdiction over even someone’s mud puddle if it is big enough, and on and on.  These are regulations costing billions, even trillions, of dollars, with little in the way of benefits and a great deal of restricted freedom.

What I want to explore here is why these regulations keep coming?  I want to go beyond the more obvious answer that the Obama administration is no doubt the most ideologically left one in American history.  It certainly does desire to “transform” America, as promised.  And it is beyond even Progressive, at least as that term was understood in terms of its content in the early 1900s and into the New Deal (1930s) and Great Society (1960s) eras.  It resembles more the Social Democracies of Europe.  But what drives these attitudes other than political ideology?  I submit there is at least one other basic foundational disposition on the part of many in pow.er today—and sometimes even conservatives.  It is encompassed in what Virginia Postrel labeled “technocracy” and “reactionism.” (The Future and Its Enemeies.  Free Press, 1998)  They are separate ideas, but often come together in policy and legislation.

The central value of technocrats is control, but not usually control just for the sake of it, but with a goal in mind.  They value stasis, the “status quo” as they understand it.  They fear change, particularly change they cannot control, because they fear the future that cannot be known.  The way to do this, they say, is to manage change, to implement a plan for everything, and with the supreme confidence that their plans (and only their plans) can be managed into reality.  This is a group of individuals, holding a great deal of power in today’s political environment, who cannot abide letting the future “evolve,” as in market evolution.  They are terrified of any vacuum in human affairs that would simply allow individuals freedom.  Just a personal note:  I feel sorry to an extent to people like this.  They must be unable to relax and enjoy life, because somewhere in their world there may still be an uncontrolled aspect of life.  I do not however feel sorry enough not to oppose this mindset at every possible turn.

When this “ideology” permeates our state and national (as well as local) government leaders, then we are indeed in for an interesting future, not to mention present.  Technocracy not only must have plans but it must populate its solutions with “experts” to manage our poor, brutish lives.  Many of us thought that when the phrase “big brother is watching” became popular, it was used in jest—and it was, then.  Now it is a little bit closer to reality—at least that is the aspiration of technocrats.

As a result of their efforts, legislation has become ever more complex and applied to ever greater parts of our lives.  As a result, regulations coming from the agencies created by legislation to “implement” the grand plans have become even more complex and sometimes incomprehensible (many companies have to hire lawyers just to interpret the rules and the rule-makers many times don’t know what their rules mean).  We now see massive bureaucracies, with all of their pathologies, in existence, who sole purpose is to manage the lives of the rest of us, for whatever goal the technocrats have determined is for our good.  Deviation, discretion are frowned on, even punished—with fines even, sometimes worse.

The opposite of the technocrats are the dynamists, that rag-tag band of all sorts of other ideologies who want freedom to dream, innovate, be entrepreneurs, make profit, and yes, employ people while solving problems without someone looking over their shoulder all the time.  They believe (like Friedrich Hayek) that the future is impossible to predict because information/knowledge is so difficult to obtain about so many details and because there are so many unintended consequences to any policy.  They believe the best way to get things done that truly benefit people and that create conditions for flourishing is just to allow people, individually or in groups (companies, non-profits, voluntary organizations) to think and to act in the light of what they do know, that “thing” called “local knowledge” which doesn’t require impossible and comprehensive knowledge about every contingency.  They plan, yes, but their plans are modest, not grandiose and utopian.  But for them to be successful, they require freedom.

We have been following the technocratic approach for some time, along with its “evil twin,” reactionsim, which actually wants to roll us back to the past.  It simply is not working.  All this massive technocratic superstructure has buried citizens in red tape and inaction.  It is time to take at least one page from the Libertarian playbook (one does not have to be Libertarian) and free real people to follow their passions and their God-given callings without fear of suppression by the heavy hand of the state.  That approach is a hard slog.  I don’t see it happening overnight.  Bureaucrats will not easily give up power to “help” us, politicians will not easily give up their power they have to be re-elected by giving us many things to make the bad-tasting medicine of technocracy go down better.  And many voters are quite happy just to go along.  That attitude must be changed, one person at a time.

One more thing.  I do not oppose planning per se.  But the kind I have been talking about is pernicious and only stifles human creativity and reason and leads not to flourishing but to poverty and at best, a life very like the sedated happiness written about in George Orwell’s 1984.  I cannot conceive of that as an existence that God would approve, even while at the same time, I do not advocate total freedom to do anything.