It’s Not Your Help to Give

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Nothing so infuriates me as when a person, entrusted with authority by an institution, becomes so arrogant as to imagine that the authority they wield — the perks of their office, their power to reward or punish others — is their own personal possession.

Anyone who has ever worked in a large organization knows the type: They play favorites, rewarding their pets, surrounding themselves with sycophants, claiming credit for work they did not do, backstabbing rivals and generally fostering a cliqueish mentality that sabotages morale and undermines overall effectiveness.

This is a common problem of organizational dynamics. The selfish attitudes of the Bad Boss tend to create a toxic environment where people spend more time playing “office politics” than actually doing the kind of work that advances the organizational mission.

It is unfortunate to read Rosie Gray’s account of the sorry state of affairs at FreedomWorks these days, which gives liberals a chance to gloat over the ruin of a once formidable institution, and to mock the Tea Party for having its leadership thus corrupted. Selah.

Yet I would turn your eye away from that squalid scene to something that should enrage you even more. Lee Stranahan has lately been unleashing a steady stream of stories about the Pigford scandal.

In the latest, “The Paranoid Racism Of Shirley Sherrod,” Lee cites the former U.S. Department of Agriculture official on her encounter with a white farmer who sought assistance:

During his first visit with me, Roger talked nervously about his service to his country. I didn’t perceive it as nervous talk because I didn’t know him at the time. I perceived it as a white man showing that he was asking me for help but at the same time showing me he was superior. He talked about having been on a submarine and his service to his country. Referring to the foreclosure, he said, “I don’t believe my country will do this to me.”

Did you catch that? The farmer “was asking me for help.”

No, ma’am. He was asking the U.S. government for help.

My libertarian soul abhors this, by the way. If it were up to me, the whole system of federal farm subsidies would be eliminated. If a farmer can’t make a living on the farm, let him find some other line of work.

Uncle Sam shouldn’t be picking winners and losers.

The story of the Pigford scandal is a perfect example of how such a system of government largesse can be wrongfully exploited, and the fact that race was the basis of apparent favoritism is in some ways incidental to the fundamental problem. Our universities, for example, have been corrupted by the provision of federal aid, including research grants that are often used to fund redundant or useless studies in the social sciences. The entire Higher Education Bubble which Professor Glenn Reynolds has described is a direct consequence of federal meddling, including the student-loan racket.

And it is the selfish arrogance of Shirley Sherrod, even more than any accusation of racism, that should enrage us most. Here she is, a public servant entrusted as a steward of taxpayer resources, permitting her resentment of a farmer’s perceived attitude of “superiority” to influence her decision to provide him whatever assistance to which the law may entitle him. Sherrod evidently regarded her government job as a personal possession, so that her exercise of official authority conferred upon her some special dignity, so that even a U.S. Navy veteran was required to approach her with an attitude of deference and supplication.

Was the white farmer racist? Was Shirley Sherrod racist? I don’t give a damn, but government officials are not a privileged caste, and we should not be required to kiss their ridiculously overpaid asses in order for them to do their taxpayer-funded jobs.

Now, go hit Lee Stranahan’s tip jar. He’s doing the Lord’s work.

 

 


67 comments

  1. I ran into those types while in the USAF and afterwards. It just amazes me how many see us, their customers, as an annoyance to be brushed off as quickly as possible with the least work!

  2. “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

    – John Dalberg-Acton, 1887

  3. I’m pretty sure, though, that the ACA will do away with petty tyrants and their need to be pleased or supplicated otherwise heart-touched before they do their jobs.

  10. Well it isn’t as if we didn’t already know that we needed to abolish the Department of Agriculture.

    In addition to the inevitable evil of needing to staff it with bureaucrats it’s scope grows year after year. When food stamps or whatever the original “feed the needy” programs were called were created it was paired with “agricultural” programs because farmers make food right? Now agri subsidies and food welfare create an un-natural lobbying coalition between redistributionists, big agriculture and the large banks that administer the EBT system. The only significant mutual self interest between these groups is increasing the Department of Agriculture’s budget every year. This same pattern of nefarious alliances happens across the spectrum of federal (feral?) departments and agencies from the EPA to HUD. Given that these government entities are not just infested with bureaucrats but are infested with Democrats it’s not difficult to see why almost every federal Department and Agency needs to be abolished every ten or twenty years.

  12. That story about Freedom Works was LONG on gripes about cash, and very, very short on the Armey putsch.

    I don’t know anyone personally involved, and my contribution to FreedomWorks was back before Beck started his network, so I have no dog in the fight. But I can tell that was heavily one sided, just from the collection of gripes (which are all really sort of the same gripe expanded into little pieces).

    The bigger story is about the schism in the leadership and people being escorted off premises, etc. Beck claims Progressive Republicans tried to take the organization over and kick the Libertarians out. Besides, paying Dick Armey eight huge to take a hike would certainly make more impact on the ledger than an eight large hotel bill.

    Does anyone have anything real on that?

  15. This hits on the thing that irks me the most about big government. It actually makes me madder to read such a true description of the arrogant entitlement of the megabureacrat!

    Stranahan is doing a hell of a lot of good work.

  16. Reminds me of the time that Barbara Boxer scolded a general who had the nerve to address her as “ma’am” instead of “your majesty.”

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