[CLIP] Bruce Pardy: The Triumph of the Administration State

And if the government has a license to treat people differently, depending upon their identity, then they now have a license to punish and reward as they wish. Sometimes people confuse equality with freedom, and those two things are different. People sometimes look to equality to provide freedom, but the idea of equality of treatment is really the right to be subject to the same awful dictatorial laws as everybody else, whereas freedom is the right not to be subject to those laws. And sometimes people pursue freedom by looking to equality. But nevertheless, equal treatment is part of, if you like, the rule of law. If you are going to adjust your rules for every particular case so as to provide the outcome that you want, that means you don't really have a rule at all. Hayek said that one of the elements of the rule of law was rules fixed and announced beforehand. That is, they can rule us, the government can rule us, but they have to tell us ahead of time what the rule is going to be so we understand what it is, or we can understand it and govern ourselves accordingly. And then they're held accountable to those rules, right? Exactly. But what's happened in the era of the administrative state, not just with this equality thing, but in a much broader way, is that we don't have those. Instead, we have decision makers, both in the executive branch and all of these agencies and so on, but even in the courts, making decisions as they go about things. A lot of the agencies and the bureaucrats and the professional experts see themselves as being there to solve social problems. In order to do that, you need flexibility. You need to be agile. You need to be able to respond to things. You need to be able to manage here and there, to adjust as you go along. That is the opposite of the kind of rule of law that Hayek was talking about. You can't do that if you're going to have a rule of law. And the administrative state and all its people are inclined to see the rule of law as an obstacle, an inconvenience to achieving the kind of society that we can have. And what they're missing is that that inconvenience that the rule of law provides, that obstacle, is not just an inconvenience. That's the point. You need to be there to prevent you from managing things on a case-by-case, one-off basis, making up things as you go along. That's what it's supposed to be there for. But more and more, that idea is eroding. And so we have the alternative, which is you've got a whole bunch of people in this enormous machine of the administrative state solving or trying to solve—not doing very well at it—but trying to solve social problems, one thing at a time, making things up as they go. This is very profound, what you're describing. I see the response to COVID, the pandemic, however, and people have different views on how it all happened. But basically, what you're telling me here is that that response—and this is something that happened near globally—is a crystallization of one particular philosophy of governance, which is some kind of, I'll call it benevolent and quotes, technocracy, a rule by expert. It's the crowning achievement so far of that belief, the belief that in order for civilization to carry on and to be successful, that we need experts in a bureaucracy managing things so that things don't fall apart. And that is a belief that I think, I'm afraid, is probably widely held, and widely held even across the political spectrum. Even those political actors, Republicans in the United States, for example, who don't approve of over-regulation and too much bureaucracy and too many taxes and overspending, I think if you challenge them, a lot of them would still say, well, we need an expert bureaucracy. We need an administration in order to make our way through life. And the opposite view is, look, this is just a belief. It is just one of the ways of doing government, and our experience with it over the past while, and especially during COVID, shows it doesn't work. I mean, if anything else, they have shown during COVID their incompetency. They've shown that they're captured by other interests against which they're supposed to be protecting the public. If the failure is so obvious during COVID, what makes you think that they'd be any good at very many other things? And I think we can go down a whole long list of things that we think they're good for and find out actually that in many of these situations, the biggest danger, the biggest risk to us all is the meddling that the state is able to do. Just on this point of the significant and repeated failures of these policies that were instituted and profoundly altered civilization, I know we agree on this. Not everyone thinks, and as you alluded to earlier, as you said earlier, and not everyone thinks it was a failure. No. In fact, some people believe to this day that these things were a success despite overwhelming evidence, incredibly well documented. That phenomenon is something I struggle with. In many ways, the most disappointing thing about this experience during COVID was the fact that a great many people supported the regime and they didn't seem to have very much appreciation for the aberration that it represented. I mean, if you thought of the way people thought about their society before COVID, the idea that the government should take it upon itself, tell people whether or not they can open their businesses, go outside, walk through the park, and all the other ways that they directed the activities of all of us, it just wouldn't have been thinkable. I, even the authorities themselves, I would expect would have thought, you know, well, we'd like to do that, but we simply can't do that. People won't put up with it. But they did. They put up with it and they wanted more of it. And that is the uncomfortable realization that there are other people in your country who don't think of their country in the same way that you do at all. And then you wonder where it is that you live.