Leave it to Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance to enunciate the rightwing view on bureaucracy, a view that is diametrically opposed to the libertarian view. According to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, which criticizes Vance for his “disregard for the constitutional balance of powers and the rule of law,” Vance stated in a 2021 interview: “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people.” It would be difficult to better capture the rightwing view on bureaucracy than that.
The perfect demonstration of this rightwing perspective is with respect to the Covid crisis. Every day throughout the crisis, rightwingers would exclaim, “Fauci! Fauci! Fauci!” in their articles, speeches, podcasts, interviews, and other presentations. They would complain about how Anthony Fauci was implementing destructive and tyrannical polices in his roles as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and as chief medical advisor to the president.
What was the rightwing solution to such policies? Their position was summarized by the words of J.D. Vance — fire Fauci and replace him with a rightwinger, one who would supposedly make better decisions and implement better healthcare policies than Fauci and other leftwing bureaucrats who were in charge of healthcare.
The same phenomenon occurred on the state and local level. Every day throughout the Covid crisis, the Internet was replete with rightwing articles, podcasts, and the like criticizing the lockdowns, the mask mandates, the vaccine requirements, the social-distancing requirements, and other policies and practices that violate the principles of a free society.
What was the rightwing solution to all this Covid tyranny? J.D. Vance sums it up perfectly: Fire the healthcare tyrants and replace them with rightwingers.
The thing to keep in mind about bureaucracy is that it will always, without fail, come with inefficiencies, mistakes, faults, foibles, or, in the classic rightwing phrase, “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Inevitably, it also comes with measures that infringe liberty and even constitute tyranny.
Thus, anyone can spend every day for the rest of his life pointing out the faults and failures, inefficiencies, and anti-freedom measures of both federal and state bureaucrats. That’s what was happening throughout the Covid crisis. It was never difficult for rightwingers or anyone else to come up with bad, inefficient, and tyrannical things that federal and state bureaucrats were doing as part of their anti-Covid crusade.
What mattered was when one reached the end of a rightwing article, speech, or podcast about Covid. That’s where the rightwingers would usually put their solution. That’s how one could tell that it was a rightwing perspective, rather than a libertarian perspective, on Covid. Their solution was always, “The system needs reform.” And by “reform,” they meant simply replacing the people in charge of combatting Covid with rightwingers, as J.D. Vance pointed out.
One big problem with this rightwing approach was that it would inevitably lead toward a different set of infringements on liberty and and a different type of tyranny. The rightwingers wanted to use the government’s powers, both at the federal and state level, to severely punish people who had issued or prescribed the Covid vaccine or who had issued healthcare mandates under the state’s healthcare powers. Some rightwingers even advocated extrajudicial punishment — that is, no trials — because they were personally certain of who was guilty and deserving of punishment. Others favored punishment even if the people they were targeting had not violated any statute on the books. In other words, instead of a leftwing reign of healthcare terror, we’d have a rightwing reign of healthcare terror.
How does the rightwing view on bureaucracy, as enunciated by rightwinger J.D. Vance, compare with the libertarian view on bureaucracy? We libertarians favor the dismantling of the healthcare bureaucracy or, even better, a complete separation of healthcare and the state. In other words, we don’t want to replace Fauci or any other healthcare bureaucrat with someone else. Our goal is to remove government entirely from healthcare, just as our ancestors removed the federal government from religion through the First Amendment. Ideally, this would mean a constitutional amendment modeled after the First and Fourteenth Amendments: “Neither the Congress nor the states shall enact any law respecting the provision, establishment, or regulation of healthcare or abridging the free exercise thereof.”
For rightwingers, that would be anathema because it would mean that they could no longer implement a reign of rightwing healthcare tyranny. What rightwingers fail to comprehend is that freedom is preferable to both leftwing and rightwing tyranny.
Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.
