Empire as the Price of Bureaucracy
03/12/2025 • Mises Wire • David Brady, Jr. • CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote in 1952, “We have to accept Big Government for the duration [of the Cold War]—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.” Since, the conservative establishment has sacrificed the nation at the altar of defeating the latest boogeyman abroad. They have accepted bureaucracy in place of markets, technocracy in place of community, the welfare state in place of charity, and the cult of state in place of church.
But perhaps there is room for a slight revision of this standard view. Rather than just see these as consequences of empire, perhaps they are the cause of empire. Perhaps empire is the price of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. Bureaucracy expands like a virus and must conquer all in its path as it grows, even if that is onto the shores of other lands.
The seminal work for Austrian and libertarian analysis of bureaucracy is Mises’s Bureaucracy. In it, Mises describes the differences between profit motive and bureaucratic management, the latter being characterized by its discoordination and inefficiency. It cannot operate except by groping in the dark since it lacks market prices. It is also predatory. By nature, a bureaucracy attacks private enterprise and begins the slow bureaucratization of private enterprise. Management in itself is not necessarily bureaucratic, because it can act efficiently so long as it can engage in economic calculation. But as bureaucratic control begins to encompass business—through regulation and taxation—bureaucrats begin to enter stage-left and subvert the efficiency of a business.
Human resource managers, tax accountants, “business-government relations” staff, and the like are all examples of legally-empowered private bureaucrats. The specific individual can be fired, but their role must be filled by someone lest they be in violation of X, Y, or Z code or regulation. Their role is legally protected and often the individuals occupying the roles have trained specifically to understand compliance with government bureaucracy.
Having control over funds and legal protection of their jobs, it is easy for these private bureaucrats to subvert private enterprise and steer resources towards their desires. Hence, human resources pushing “woke” causes in global corporations. Often this is in coordination with the government, whose money mandates certain tasks contrary to the natural profit motive and thus...more bureaucrats!
Murray Rothbard contributes his own analysis to bureaucracy when he introduces us to Parkinson’s Law. This tells us that the number of bureaucrats in public administration continues to grow regardless of the work available. Rothbard applies this to practical bureaucratic incentives in government. Bureaucrats can find a higher station by multiplying their subordinates (but not their rivals). Thus, new work must be undertaken and the various tasks that underpin this work must be distributed amongst subordinate employees. This is a fast path for promotion and expansion of one’s agency.
This can also occur in private enterprises, but likely on a smaller scale, as the business still doesn’t make money through inflation or taxation and thus is still constrained by profit margins. These private bureaucrats can increase their importance by advocating for further subordinate employees to work under them, likely under the auspices of some compliance or social cause.
The core lesson is that bureaucracy expands. It must expand, because every bureaucrat is self-interested (whether for monetary, ideological, or religious reasons) and thinks their cause is just. They wish for higher roles and higher pay. To achieve this, new work must be found. The bureaucratic expansion over all aspects of society must continue.
Slowly, more spheres of influence must be conquered. These centers of power must be absorbed into the bureaucratic apparatus. Welfare, instead of charity, can be justified through bureaucratic ideologies like progressivism, so the bureaucrats must take up the job! Healthcare is conquered by regulators who must make up for supposed failings. So-called “market failures” must be cured by further bureaucrats and monopolies investigated by now-expert “economists” and lawyers. Self-interested bureaucrats must absorb business, charity, community, and church into their spheres of influence.
Domestic concerns need not be the only concern. The bureaucratic expansion does not stop at our shores. Between the Army, Navy, Homeland Security, Airforce, and Defense Department, military and foreign affairs comprised around 43 percent of domestic federal employees (this does not even begin to account for State Department staff employed abroad and the intelligence community). Defense spending and bureaucracy is one of the largest undertakings of the United States government. The United States has over 800 bases in over 80 countries. It has State Department staff in nearly every country with embassies to accompany them. Foreign aid is a large component of spending and employs a vast network of bureaucrats under the guise of NGOs.
If we conclude that bureaucracy is ever-expanding, it is no wonder that self-interested bureaucrats would become the lackeys of empire. Manufacturing crises which America needs to engage with is a classic tactic. It is no coincidence that the age of total bureaucracy coincides with the age of wars based on lies. Bureaucrats—hoping to expand their own roles—expand their duties by creating a narrative for their action abroad: whether it’s diplomacy, foreign aid, or military engagement. Further funds allow them to expand their bureaucracy into other countries and increase their own prestige.
This is not unlike the causes of the Second World War that James Burnham identifies in The Managerial Revolution. He describes the conflict between the Soviet Union and Germany—and soon the United States—as competitions between spheres of bureaucratic power. Today, American bureaucrats who found their institutional origins in the Progressive Era and New Deal expand their spheres of influence into every other nation of the world.
This is why there is writhing and screaming from professional intelligence agencies and defense officials when the thought of scaling back empire is proposed. Their bottom line is at risk. Often their ideological convictions are at risk. Bureaucrats must capture other spheres of power and that now includes other countries.
When one seriously considers the thesis of Robert Higgs’s Crisis & Leviathan, this pattern of behavior is unsurprising to say the very least. Wilson’s culmination of the progressive era was found in the first World War and its cartelizing War Industries Board. FDR’s New Deal needed World War II as the crisis by which he could sidestep the courts and bureaucratize further. Leviathan grows in crisis and bureaucracy is the maker of them. Wars are the most profitable opportunities for bureaucratic expansion, which is why war and empire are the price we pay for a bureaucratic system.
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