Given the results of this last election, this may be just me spitting into the wind, but it needs to be said.  Given their votes in this last election, it appears that a majority of Californians like endless, unaccountable bureaucracies, and are willing to give bureaucrats more power.  History shows that the dynasties of Chinese empires collapsed under the weight of unaccountable bureaucracy.  California appears to be headed for the same fate, and the only way to stop it is to educate  Californians with anecdotes about bureaucracies out of control.

I started this story a few months ago, when I told of my personal story about the FPPC (who, as I said, should be called the Kommittee to Grow Bureaucracy, or the KGB for short).  Yes, they have filed charges against me, and yes, they are asking for $15,000.00 in fines for three supposed violations of campaign finance law.  My violations?  I missed filing some campaign finance reports in 2008 (long after I left office) for a committee that collected no money, and I failed to terminate the committee.  I happened to be out of the country that year, trying to earn money so I could pay more taxes to the state, so forgetting to file reports on a dormant committee (that I thought had been terminated) was understandable, but the FPPC was undaunted.  I had to pay.

Oh yes, and there was one other violation, I gave my last $2000 in that committee to Guy Houston.  I disclosed the contribution, and Guy disclosed it, but it turns out the FPPC thinks I gave it from the wrong committee.  I could have contributed to any one of three other committees I had and given it to Guy legally, but the FPPC said I didn’t do that, so they think I am evil.

They are now trying to have me declared a corrupt, evil guy.  I spent 14 years in the Legislature without a single complaint against me; they investigated me for a year, giving me an exam that would qualify them for a proctology license, and this is the best they could come up with?  I am challenging them, but that is not the end of the story.

This week, they decided to exercise their muscle.  They got a story run in a political newspaper where they claim that I owe them $2800 from some fine they assessed in 2004.  I didn’t see anything about  it then, and when they finally wrote me about it last year, I challenged them and got a letter from the Secretary of State saying "the balance had been reduced to zero," but the bureaucrats are undeterred.  I have the gall to challenge them.  I have the gall to exercise my first amendment rights to petition the government for a redress of my grievances.  I have asked for my due process rights under the 14th amendment before they take my money.

We can’t tolerate that, says the bureaucracy, so we will attempt to assassinate your character using our contacts in the media, who, we know, will report what we say without question.  The reporter didn’t bother to call me (or if he did, he didn’t leave a message), didn’t investigate the bureaucrat’s claim, and didn’t even try to find out if he was being told the truth.  The bureaucracy had their way with the media, and the reporter happily gave up his newspaper’s virtue to allow the bureaucracy to attack a citizen who had the guts to stand up to the bureaucracy.

I don’t know what is going to happen at my hearing.  I am being prosecuted by state employees, the judge is a state employee (it is an administrative law judge, who is a part of the bureaucracy), and the final arbiter of my fate is the Fair Political Practices Commission.  That is how bureaucracy works.  Bureaucrats prosecute and bureaucrats judge.  If you don’t knuckle under, the state sponsored media gives the bureaucrats a large public forum to assassinate your character.  The lesson?  Give up or be brutalized publicly by the government.

I am a big boy.  I have been in public life.  I can take it.  There are thousands of others, however, who are intimidated by this process, and give in, even when they are innocent.  It is not worth it to them to challenge this type of unlimited power.

Republicans are as guilty of promoting big government as Democrats.  Some of my Republican friends in the Legislature thought campaign finance "reform" was a Republican "issue."  The fact is, it doesn’t matter how "good" the government program sounds, once the bureaucracy is created, it will become overzealous.  It will exceed its power.  It will trample on the rights of citizens who shouldn’t be under its scrutiny.  Campaign finance "reform" created the FPPC, and now the FPPC has turned into the KGB.  It is that way each time we create another bureaucracy to control another alleged problem.

We are closer to the dynasties of China than we think.  We have a great history of freedom, but bureaucrats are trying to appropriate the good will that the government has created in its defense of freedom in that past to demand allegiance to those in government who would trample on that freedom today.  Those bureaucrats are fast consuming that good will, and when that good will is gone, the people will turn on the government.  It will collapse under the bureaucracy just as the Chinese dynasties did.

Perhaps there are people of good will in the government who will stop that, but the number of those people appear to be shrinking.  If they cannot stop it, and the government does collapse, there will be a steep price to pay.  I only hope we survive it.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 19th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.