"The bureaucratic imperative operates at every level within an agency. It states that the way to gain power, prestige, and greater pay is to control a larger budget and have more people working for you. In most countries, this imperative is deliberately outlined in the pay plan for agency officials....There is no incentive to work efficiently."
- Jim Davidson, The Atlantis Papers, 1994.
"Surplus order is that excess order imposed not for the benefit of society, but exclusively for the benefit of those who control the state. Surplus order is the antithesis of beneficial or socially necessary order. The regime that imposes surplus order on its suffering citizens deprives itself of the Rousseauian justification for existence."
- Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, 1990.
| Brown Survives Contempt Impeach Janet Reno |
Mac Attack Operation Lightning Strike |
Whistling in Dixie Worms |
Janet Reno has plausible deniability. More than anything else, that is what she wanted out of the crisis at Mount Carmel. Thus, she left the FBI command center that fateful day in April 1993 after ordering the tanks to move in. Her presence wasn't needed to ensure that the tanks would batter down walls, inject CS gas and a flammable gas, and viciously murder the men, women and children inside.
The Secretary of the Treasury has plausible deniability for his role in the ATF raid on Mount Carmel which started the crisis. He wasn't told that the jack-booted storm troopers would be firing first, nor that they would execute the female dog and her entire litter of puppies just outside the church doors. He didn't know that helicopters with machine-gun toting miscreants would fire on the church buildings from above, murdering at least one unarmed civilian.
The possession of weapons by inhabitants of the Branch Davidian mission at Mount Carmel is clearly protected under the United States Constitution. That document, so remote from most Americans whose government-operated schools do little to educate on the principles of liberty, reads, in part, "A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Certainly, events bore out their concern that their compound might be attacked by an armed force determined to disrupt their way of life.
The practice of an unusual and somewhat unpopular religion by the inhabitants of Mount Carmel is also protected by the United States Constitution. Again, the US Constitution reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Upholding this Constitution was the sworn duty of every agent who participated in each attack. The ultimate justification for the second storming of Mount Carmel was the possibility that the children inside had been abused and might suffer mistreatment. Although the evidence for this charge had been investigated by Texas’s Child Protective Services and found to be baseless, the effort to eliminate this threat of harm was certainly disastrous. Every single child remaining in the compound was killed in the final conflagration. No matter who actually set that final fire, it is clear that the deaths of all those children would not have occurred without the second attack on the compound.
Indeed, the Davidians had agreed to surrender within the next month. Why the hurry to impose a massive retaliation for the deaths of a few Federal agents who had participated in a poorly conceived, budget justifying, largely unplanned, entirely unnecessary, deliberately brutal and excessive raid against a group whose leaders had previously surrendered to law enforcement officials when faced with far more serious charges? As David Koresh had demonstrated in facing murder charges several years earlier, and as he and other Davidian leaders stated repeatedly during the standoff, the entire incident could have been avoided by an initial request for their surrender to authorities. Koresh’s attorney has pointed out that the Davidians invited the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to inspect their weapons months before the incident and that the ATF’s warrant request had noted neighbors concerns about automatic gunfire but neglected to mention that those claims were investigated by local law enforcement and found to be untrue. So why the hurry? Why the intense atmosphere of confrontation and the overt use of force? Television.
The story just kept showing up in newspapers and on television. What was the government doing? What were the Davidians doing? How could a few kooks keep all those government agents from doing anything? The need to impose massive, dominating, and finalizing order was the impetus for the second attack. It was entirely "for the benefit of those who control the state." The idea that anyone could challenge the power of the US Government, even for a short period, was intolerable to those who held that power. So the Secretary of the Treasury and the Attorney General of the United States allowed this massacre to take place on their watch so they would not appear to be weak.
The spectacle near Waco is one of the most infamous events of bureaucracy in America, but it is hardly the only notable one.
But what, you ask, does all this information have to do with space? Bureaucracies are corrupt, vicious, murderous, irresponsible, and are not to be trusted. They waste money and they kill people.
NASA killed three people in the Apollo fire. NASA killed seven more in the Challenger accident. In both instances, the deaths could have been avoided. Are we to trust NASA more because its killings were the result of negligence rather than deliberate intent? Certainly not.
NASA destroys companies that attempt to compete in its protected monopoly arenas, from running a space tourist activity near the Johnson Space Center to offering weightless aircraft flights to movie producers, to launching satellites. NASA wastes taxpayer money on ill-fated projects like Mars Observer, and poorly implemented projects like Hubble and Galileo. NASA is a bloated bureaucracy, and it should be destroyed, eliminated, halted, and otherwise brought to an immediate end.
But the damage done by the other bureaucracies, the alphabet soup of Washington, DC, is also to blame for the lack of effective space development activities. The IRS destroys companies and individuals, with seeming impunity. The FBI murders and destroys lives, falsely arresting and falsely accusing. The ATF does the same. The Secret Service does the same. The DEA does worse.
Federal, state, and local governments in America are filled with agencies that empower bureaucrats to subtract value from the economy. Through their efforts, people, property, and activities are taxed, licensed, regulated, prohibited, destroyed, eliminated, and murdered, not necessarily in that order. No wonder our companies can't afford to invest in the future of humanity in space.
