The fall of empires is immediately preceded by the rise of bureaucracies within that empire. I’m too old and lazy to prove that through a scholarly treatise, but I study history a lot.

A bureaucracy eerily resembles a slow, but ultimately deadly parasite. Its species-specific imperative is to grow – nothing more. Bureaucracies eventually have no loyalty to the state, no love of country, no honor, no scruples, no mercy and no impetus to be efficient. Indeed, efficiency is anathema to bureaucracies because it’s the vaccine that controls the disease. It doesn’t cure it, but it can control it.

To prove this, I could probably go back and document the growth of the civil service in the Roman Empire. Every other historian seems to want to concentrate on the character of its emperors. Or I could look at the gradual transfer of power from the Ottoman sultans to their viziers, or the clerical masses that rendered China nearly impotent when faced with the surge of Western powers.

But I need only look at America. After World War II and on into the late 60s, the United States was the largest creditor nation on Earth. Now, we are the largest debtor nation on Earth. We’ve discovered a way to spend what we do not have, and most of that spending goes to the ever-growing functions of ever-growing bureaucracies.

Consider: In March 2013, federal, state, and local governments employed 21.8 million people. In 1946, that number was 6 million. In 1960, it was 8.8 million. In 1970, it was 13 million. In 1990, it was 18 million.

It seems like every elected president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has felt it necessary to add to the government. Kennedy added the Peace Corps; Johnson added Medicare and Medicaid and the War on Poverty; Nixon added the EPA; Carter added the Department of Education; Reagan gave us tolerance of huge deficits to help pay for an enormous defense department; George H.W. Bush gave us the Americans with Disabilities Act; Clinton doubled U.S. aid for college students and gave us the Family and Medical Leave Act; George W. Bush gave us the No Child Left Behind Act, and Obama has given us ObamaCare.

What all these presidents’ leagacies share is that none of them substantially removed any part of the federal machine despite the clear and abject failure of many of these programs. For instance, the education level of the American K-12 student has not improved one whit since the creation of the cabinet-level Department of Education, and hordes of children have been left behind – no high school degree – since George W. Bush left office. The War on Poverty has been waged for nearly 50 years, and the percentage of Americans living in poverty has not fallen.

However, these programs have grossly expanded federal, state and local bureaucracies, which means they put more clerks behind desks and more enforcers on the streets. If you actually read the Affordable Care Act, which few if any of our lawmakers did, you will find a mandate to put 15,000 more IRS agents out there to enforce the dictates of the law.

So why point this out? Because revolution and upheaval come when the people have had enough, and this worries me. I love my country. Americans have a long tradition of personal freedom, and I don’t believe they are going to stand for the steady erosion of those freedoms foisted on them by some dweeb from the U.S. Department of Redundancy Department.

And I know this is happening with increasing frequency because it is happening to myself and my friends. We are by and large middle class, college educated, loyal Americans. Some of us have owned businesses, some have served in the military. We have worked all our lives and we vote regularly. Some of us have even served in public office. Most of all, we are law-abiding. We pay our taxes, we feel that being on welfare is shameful, and we think the Kardashians are self-absorbed idiots. Yet we feel helpless as large organizations interrupt and degrade our lives.

So why do we get persecuted by petty bureaucrats? And what do I mean by persecuted?

“Computer Generated”

• I’ll start with me. I owned a small business – a weekly newspaper – for 16 years. About the time the IRS began prejudicial behavior against conservative groups, I got a notice that I had not filed my corporate income tax returns on time. As a matter of fact, I had filed on time.

It required a little scrounging around by me and my accountant to prove that I had filed on time, but I learned that you should never send anything to the IRS without getting a proof of mailing from the Post Office. Due to complacency regarding the IRS through the decades since the 16^th Amendment was passed, settled law has been turned upside down. The IRS has merely to accuse. You have to prove your innocence, or they will come with guns and seize your property.

The IRS should have a record of when they receive tax returns, but apparently they don’t. So because the IRS can’t figure out what day of what week of what month they receive mail, I have to spend an extra $6 per mailing to prove to them they are wrong.

So I did. The following year, I received the same notice, except the threatened penalty was higher. These penalties for late filings ranged from around $400 to over $2,000. I again proved my innocence. The next year, same thing. The year after that, same thing.

In 2015, I received the same notice despite the fact that some things had changed, the major one being that I was no longer in business. The IRS should have known that because I filed the end-of-business form the year prior.

Still, I gathered my documents and mailed in my defense. In marketing parlance, this is called postage and handling, a cost for which the IRS seems unwilling to reimburse me although they perpetrated the need for the expense in the first place. My answer a couple weeks later was a notice that the IRS planned to seize a great deal of my defunct business’s assets to satisfy the penalties attached to their spurious charge, a charge they later admitted was spurious, and I have the letter to prove it.

A fellow I talked to at the IRS said the seizure notice – which went out two weeks after the IRS received my defense documents – was “computer generated” and was a mistake. Well, that was a great solace to learn that threats to deprive me of my property in direct contravention of what the Constitution appears to guarantee was “computer generated.”

• So was a bill for $1,753 (including a penalty of $166) sent to me by the Colorado Department of Revenue. I had gotten out of the newspaper business and was planning on opening a small retail shop to sell unique photos, books and sundries. Except, it wasn’t open yet. I had sold about $40 worth of stuff from people who accidently wandered in, but that was it.

However, in Colorado, you have to file a sales tax report on a quarterly basis even if you have no sales. I was a bit tardy on my third quarter report, so I got the letter. I tried to calculate what level of sales tax would require a payment of $1,580 on $40 worth of sales, but failed, so I called the Department of Revenue.

After wading through several levels of telephone menus and listening to excruciatingly bad music for 19 minutes, I got ahold of a fellow who explained that the numbers were “computer generated” and “arbitrary,” designed mainly to get your attention.

That worked, but I wonder what some elderly person of diminished mental capacity, or a careless person, or a trusting person would have done when they received this notice. There’s nothing on this bill that indicates you should do anything except pay immediately.

“Please follow these steps,” it says:

– “Write your account number on your check.”

– “Enclose this coupon with your check. Do NOT staple.”

– “Mail and make checks payable to Colorado Department of Revenue.”

Oh, and after I was found innocent of this transgression and casually told that I actually don’t owe $1,753, I asked the Colorado Department of Revenue to send me a letter confirming that I did not owe that because just exactly what is the computer going to do when this account comes up next quarter?

“We don’t do that,” the DOR guy replies.

Reeling in that Refund

Think this is just me? I have a friend in another state whom I shall call “Tyrone.” He didn’t want me to use his real name because he fears retribution from the Colorado Department of Revenue. Imagine that – fear of retribution from a bureaucracy. How far are we away from actual fines and imprisonment when we criticize the government?

Anyway, Tyrone sold some property in Colorado. In the interest of being sure that not a penny of possible revenue is missed, Colorado withholds a certain part of the sale price when property is sold by out-of-state owners. If they withhold too much, the taxpayer – Tyrone – can apply for a refund.

In something of a given, the state withheld too much – over $1,000 too much. Tyrone documented his claim and applied for a refund. In an illustration of what little people have to deal with when faced with an intransigent bureaucracy, I will simply reprint in part the letter Tyrone got in reply from the Colorado Department of Revenue:

“The Department of Revenue has not accepted your 2014 Colorado Income Tax Return. If you disagree with the denial of the return the following information is required.

• “Submit all of the following documents that apply to you. Provide a copy of your 2014 W-2(s), 1099(s), military LES, K-1(s), settlement statement forms from the sale of your property or verification of your estimated payments (copies of the front and back of the canceled checks).
• “If you were employed, provide the date(s) you were hired.
• “If you were employed, provide a copy of the last paycheck stub(s) you were issued in 2014. If you were in the military, provide a copy of the last LES for 2014.
• “If your employer is doing business under a different name, provide the Department with both names.
• “Provide a copy of your drivers license and social security card
• “Provide the name of the employer(s) you worked for this year and last year.
• “Provide the amount of your 2013 Colorado income tax refund.

And, Tyrone was instructed to act within ten days. “Reading the enclosed got me fired up again concerning your bandits in the Colorado Dept. of Revenue,” said Tyrone, who, by the way, has a degree in accounting.

How does that make the rest of us feel? We feel ground down by the relentless machinery of bureaucracies of all types that seem to have no apertures to allow the influx of common sense or even logic into their impersonal processes.

The Remote Resort

Bill and his wife own a resort in a remote part of Colorado, and by remote, I mean that if you get within 25 miles of the place, you might need to ask directions twice more to get you through the remaining 25 miles.

It is in a county with a population of about 1,400 people with a land area of 1,600 square miles. In a U.S. Census classification, it is “frontier.” Bill’s resort is 20 miles from the nearest town over four sets of county roads. You could come in from another direction, but not in winter. Or sometimes, you can’t get there at all in winter.

Yet somehow, a young fellow from the U.S. Center for Tobacco Products managed to find this place on the only day of the week the resort is closed. Bill was there. Bill and his wife work hard enough that they take one day a week off to catch up on what didn’t get done during the previous six days. Still, the wife holds a second job in town. During busy times, they employ one or two part-time employees.

Never heard of the Center for Tobacco Products? Neither had I. It’s a division of the Food and Drug Administration, and apparently its mission is to find the absolute smallest tobacco retailers in the country and hassle the owners.

The young fellow flashes a badge, and Bill reluctantly stops what he’s doing and allows the badge flasher to enter the store. The flasher wanders around the store and then exclaims, “Aha! You can’t do that.”

It turns out Bill kept some cans of chewing tobacco on the upper shelf of a cooler. He doesn’t use the stuff, and doesn’t sell much of it, so keeping it in the cooler kept it fresher.

The flasher patiently explains that a juvenile could, despite sales counter being ten feet away, reach up into the top shelf of the cooler (this would be a tall juvenile) and obtain forbidden snuff. Chewing tobacco should be kept behind the glass of the sales counter to prevent such a heinous crime from being committed, the flasher explained.

A verbal warning might have seemed sufficient in this case, but then how could the young flasher have justified a trip to a store in the wilderness that quite possibly consumed his entire day? So he filed a two-page report of such excruciating detail that he neglected to even get Bill’s name. The perp was described as a senior male with grey/white hair. The report was two pages long, included an “inspection number,” a really bad picture of the resort and a list of federal laws governing Bill’s operation.

Now if you thought that regulation of retail tobacco sales was the purview of the state, so did I. But this isn’t the end of the story.

In the same year, Bill also got a visit from an agent of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Department. Apparently, the FDA is not the only federal agency that needs to prove it can find some of the most remote stores in the U.S. The ATF allegedly caught Bill or an employee selling tobacco to a minor. Bill and his wife didn’t dispute it. They couldn’t even recall the incident, but apologized anyway in a letter to the ATF. Now if you thought maybe the ATF had bigger fish to fry, like selling firearms to Mexican criminals, so did I. But this isn’t the end of the story either.

Bill’s resort also in that same year got inspected by the state tobacco control folks. Again, a young man with a badge wandered through the store looking for something wrong. Alas, he found something. The cigarettes Bill had for sale had a Wyoming tax stamp on them.

“No, no, no, you can’t do that,” quoth the inspector. For years, Bill had been buying cigarettes in Wyoming because that was the location of the nearest Sam’s Club. And for 16 years of annual inspections by the state, no one had said that was wrong. So the state badge flasher confiscated all the cigarettes, thereby justifying his existence.

And thereby we learn the primary purpose of a bureaucracy – to justify its own existence, its own importance, its own claim of indispensability. That is why we have come to the point in America where gigantic federal departments desperately endeavor to spend all their allotted money before Oct. 1 each year lest lawmakers find a valid excuse to cut their budgets. Thus we find the U.S. government flying immigrants from Guatemala to the U.S., but nobody seems to know how much that costs the U.S. taxpayer. Thus we find the director of Social Security in testimony before Congress unable to say how much is spent on hunting down Social Security disability fraud because “We don’t track that.”

Nobody seems to care.

Corporate Bureaucracy

And this is all not to say that bureaucratic nonsense and make-work is limited to government. I give you the case of Apple Computer. I mentioned that I published a newspaper for 16 years. I did that on an Apple computer system, and way back when, I would have said they manufacture the finest equipment in the world.

I am typing this on an Apple computer at this very moment, but I have cause to wonder how long these words will survive.

The more than 800 editions of my newspaper are stored on this computer. I can see them there. But I can’t access them because Apple or an application called Quark Express “no longer supports them.” I used to write my editorials directly onto the digital pages of the newspaper. I thought one day I would like to publish the best of them in a book. I have won numerous state and national awards for writing and photography, and I thought the best of them would make a nice archive of my life. But I can’t access them. I can’t even open the pages to cut and paste the text. I might be able to access them if I spend $894 to upgrade the layout application, but I’m not sure why I should have to do that. It’s my intellectual property. Why should I have to pay a vendor nearly $1,000 to release it to me?

Naturally I called Apple to see if they could help. I’m still waiting to try their last solution, but apparently it involves buying a backup system and a PC computer (not an Apple) to ferret out the material. I even signed up for a year’s maintenance from an Apple contractor in India to see if they could help. They couldn’t.

To me, this is extortion. Why should Apple be able to lock up my intellectual property until I fork over x-number of dollar to release it? And they did the same thing with a book I was writing. When I go into the computer to call up the book, the computer won’t open it until I purchase an upgraded program. I wrote to Apple (in pen and ink, on real paper) that what they had done was not unlike putting the Hope Diamond in a strongbox and sinking it to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Everybody would know where it was, but nobody could ever get to it, nobody would ever be able to enjoy it.

I never got a reply to my hand-written letter, by the way. It’s probably in some drawer of some corporate bureaucrat’s office. I hope he’s compelled to retrieve it someday, but is unable to find it.

Conclusion

Now you may be thinking at this point that I am an inveterate whiner, but I don’t have that many friends. When virtually all of them can relate tales similar to the ones told here, I began to draw the conclusion that the indifference of the bureaucrats is endemic. Telling these stories, I get new examples right back at me. A clerk can’t get $150 owed her by the IRS. A rural store can’t get reliable phone service despite the phone company being a regulated utility that must provide phone service to that area. A fund manager with a short position can deliberately disseminate lies about a stock, yet the SEC doesn’t seem to have the time to deal with that. Yet a score of SEC employees are caught watching porn most of the day, and no one gets fired. For that matter, the ATF can sell guns to Mexican bandits, lose track of the guns, see a border patrol agent shot dead by one of the guns, yet no one gets removed from their position of authority. However, they can find a little, bitty store in the remote mountains and zing the owner for selling cigarettes to a minor.

I was contemplating what I had written thus far, and it occurred to me that there are many bureaucrats who do their jobs well, who care about their agency’s mission. I’ve met and dealt with hundreds of such people. Then I pick up the phone to call a state agency, and I get this message: “Welcome to xyz agency. Our four-digit extensions have changed. Our second digits have changed from three to six. Please note that our four-digit extensions have changed.” How do these messages stay up for more than a day? Why doesn’t some supervisor come down and ask, “Who does this help?”

I think the average U.S. citizen has put up with this kind of thing for so long because this country has worked so well in the past. But 82 percent of those average U.S. citizens believe the IRS code is unfair, too complicated, tilted toward the rich and powerful, and ought to be scrapped. Yet Congress does nothing to fix it, nothing.

How long can this go on before there is a revolution, or states start seceding, or the dollar just collapses, or there is widespread civil disobedience. There is an old saw that says, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” I beg to differ. The IRS code alone is 74,000 pages long. The EPA just issued new regulations in which it takes over 200 pages to describe “water.” I think ignorance of the law is a perfectly good excuse.

What your common citizen experiences with regularity is ignorance of the law and genuine feelings of helplessness and impotence. I like the message on the Yahoo message board when it doesn’t work. The message is, “A mistake has happened,” which is a little like saying “A pregnancy has happened.” Neither sentence requires the name of the perpetrator. So whom do you call?

I won’t be around to see what happens when all this comes to a head. I’m 67 years old at this writing. But as these things pile up, I have to vent. Lots of people don’t have a vehicle with which to vent, or they’re not good writers, or good complainers. But they know they’re getting beaten up by nameless, faceless people who do not know their victims and don’t care to know their victims. For them, it is enough that the bureaucratic organism keeps growing and keeps getting fed with your dollars until at some point, the host dies.