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Or sign-in if you have an account.A tattered American flag lies in mud in the backyard of a destroyed house December 26, 2005 in St. Bernard Parish, Meraux, Louisiana. Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesIt wasn’t supposed to be this way. The United States was the land of the free. Limited government. Checks and balances. Separation of powers. The Bill of Rights. But America has instead become a managed society. Its government dominates the lives of its people. How did it go wrong? Lots of bad steps helped to transform the American republic into a managerial state. Here are nine of the moments that sent the ship off course.Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. 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(Subscriber-exclusive edition on Fridays)By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againThe U.S. Constitution was revolutionary. But there is wiggle room in its Article 1. Congress, it says, may make all laws “necessary and proper” for executing its mandate. That was enough for Alexander Hamilton to slip through. He wanted to create a national bank to deal with Revolutionary War debt. The Constitution lists no such power. But he persuaded George Washington to sign the bank bill in 1791. The precedent was set.The 10th Amendment, passed soon after, could have put the genie back in the bottle. Powers not delegated to the federal government, it says, are reserved to the states or “to the people.” That could have meant the federal government had no residual or implied powers. But the section omitted a key word: “expressly.” Had it said, “not expressly delegated,” the path of history might have been different. But Hamilton’s blank cheque remained.Almost a hundred years later, in 1881, President James A. Garfield was assassinated by one of his own campaign workers. The assassin was upset that Garfield had not rewarded him with a government job. Patronage made presidents vulnerable. In 1883, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act to curb the system of political patronage in federal employment. Certain federal civil servants would no longer serve at the pleasure of the president. The Pendleton Act initially applied to only about 10 per cent of the positions in the federal government, but its coverage grew rapidly. Today the president cannot appoint or dismiss most federal civil servants.In a republic, the power belongs to the people, if not directly, then at least through their elected representatives. The Pendleton Act legislated the opposite idea: administrative officers are not subject to the approval of the people’s president. If the president does not have the power to appoint and dismiss, how do the people? The answer is that they do not. The Pendleton Act and its successors did not end cronyism in the federal service. Instead, it shifted appointment powers from the president to the heads of departments and agencies. Congress had given life to what would become “the deep state.”Woodrow Wilson, the first “progressive” president, went further. Wilson said that government administrators should be regarded as a professional class operating above the political fray. They should have discretion to apply their expertise in pursuit of the common good without oversight. Through legislation and executive orders, he created federal agencies with the power to act independently. The most significant was the Federal Reserve. In 1913, Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act. With the power to set interest rates, regulate banks and act as lender of last resort, the Federal Reserve acquired the discretion to manage the economy without presidential or congressional direction.The federal government had levied income taxes during the Civil War. But the Supreme Court, in its 1895 decision in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust, insisted that federal income taxes had to be “apportioned among the states,” as the Constitution stated. That meant that taxes collected from a state with five per cent of America’s population were limited to five per cent of the total tax revenue. That prevented the federal government from taxing American citizens on their individual wealth. The 16th Amendment, proposed in 1909 and ratified in 1913, authorized Congress to tax income without apportionment. Congress wasted no time in reinstating a federal tax on incomes over $3,000. The progressive federal income tax system was born.The architecture of the U.S. Constitution establishes a strict separation of powers. Unlike Westminster systems, the legislative and executive branches are distinct. Congress makes laws, while the president runs the government to carry them out. For a while, courts gave this idea constitutional status. Under the “nondelegation doctrine,” Congress could not delegate law-making power to the president. But the Tariff Act of 1922 authorized the president to adjust tariff rates to equalize production costs between domestic and foreign goods. In 1928, in J.W. Hampton v. United States, the Supreme Court decided that the statute was constitutional. That was the beginning of the end for the nondelegation doctrine. It has not been used since 1935 to strike down federal delegation of law-making authority. Delegation of the power to make rules is the lifeblood of the administrative state.Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solution to the Great Depression was the “New Deal.” Government would protect the economic well-being of its people. In exchange, it would decide what was best. That deal turned America’s burgeoning administrative machinery into a welfare state. Before the New Deal, citizens largely fended for themselves. Under FDR, the federal government did what it had never done before. It stimulated job creation, backstopped bank deposits, established welfare programs such as Social Security, and directed economic activity. The New Deal changed the role of government. To this day, people expect governments to solve social problems and protect them from economic calamity.The gold standard protected the value of money. When fiat currency is tied to a finite physical asset, governments can’t print currency at will. Every dollar issued must be backed by the physical asset — gold — and be convertible by citizens and foreign governments. But the gold standard and the administrative state are incompatible. Wilson suspended the gold standard during the First World War to fund military expenses by printing money. FDR killed it domestically in 1933 by prohibiting citizens from owning most forms of gold, ending convertibility and devaluing the dollar. Richard Nixon ended international convertibility in 1971. When dollars are not pegged to the value of gold, governments can create new money out of thin air, producing inflation and diminishing the value of their compounding debts.Under the Constitution, executive agencies have no powers except what Congress grants them. But in 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court changed that. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had created a rule not explicitly authorized in its enabling statute. In Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the court held that the EPA could decide the limit of its own authority. If an agency’s interpretation of its own statute was reasonable, said the decision, courts should defer to the agency’s take. “Chevron deference” transferred power from Congress to the administrative state. Unelected officials obtained judicial benediction to decide the boundaries of their own powers. Agencies pushed those boundaries, asserting authority that statutes did not grant. The Supreme Court finally overturned the Chevron decision in 2024. The authority to interpret ambiguous enabling statutes returned to the courts. Time will tell whether and to what extent the decision will curb the power of federal agencies.The government response to COVID-19 was a policy train wreck. One senseless diktat followed another. Close your business. Keep your kids home from school. Stay out of the park. Don’t gather in church. Wear a mask to go into the store. Take a vaccine to keep your job. These edicts eviscerated civil liberties. They destroyed businesses, cancelled jobs and education, tore families apart and devastated people’s health. Society unravelled. And yet, government agencies excelled beyond their wildest dreams. They subordinated other interests to their priorities and directives. The COVID-19 regime was the pinnacle achievement, so far, of the modern managerial state.The United States Constitution was revolutionary. “A republic,” Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said, “if you can keep it.” They couldn’t. The seeds of the nation’s downfall are in the document itself. The Constitution does not prescribe an administrative state, but nor does it prevent one. Instead of a republic governed by the rule of law, America is now planned, directed and supervised. Broad discretion in the hands of a technocratic managerial class has become the foundation of American government.National PostBruce Pardy is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, professor of law at Queen’s University, and executive director of Rights Probe. He writes on constitutional law, civil liberties, and the administrative state. Join the Conversation This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.