The invention of the Independent Administrative Agency was a Godsend—for totalitarians. The moment you can legislate without legislators, you’ve found the philosopher’s stone of modern control. These agencies, born under the pretense of expertise and necessity, can issue rules with minimal oversight, shaping society from behind a curtain of procedural jargon.
Yes, I admit, there’s a kernel of justification. Some matters are too complex for the average parliamentarian to grasp between cocktail hours. Technical regulation—fine. Let the specialists do the detail work. But once these unelected technocrats begin drafting sweeping rules that tilt the entire playing field, once their pen strokes morph into instruments of social or economic engineering, the line between governance and quiet dictatorship blurs beyond recognition.
Broad policy should be the realm of the legislator, not the bureaucrat. Regulation should not be a parallel form of lawmaking—especially not when it creates burdens indistinguishable from taxation. Because that’s what it is: the confiscation of freedom and capital through paperwork instead of police.
Taxation, at least, must pass through the front door of democratic consent. Regulation sneaks in through the service entrance, uninvited but terribly efficient. Both drain the lifeblood of the citizen, one openly, the other by a thousand cuts. The least we should demand is that voters have a say in how thoroughly they wish to be fleeced—not by ballot through trembling bureaucrats, but directly through those they actually elect.The rule of the bloodless sycophant is the final evolution of tyranny—quiet, procedural, and completely deniable.
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2025/10/15/president_trump_is_fixing_ferc_1141221.html