Agencies Quotes

We tend to be hard on our intelligence agencies for a combination or reasons. Because much of their activity is secret and many of their successes are not known to the public. If they have a great success, the politicians generally take the credit. But if the intelligence agency makes a big error that causes a failure of some kind, a the politicians often violate the secrecy and blame the intelligence agencies. The Iraq Invasion of the George W, Bush administration was a good example. The President had received intelligence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. He invaded to prevent their being used. It turned ouit that there were no nuclear weapons at all, and the President and leaders of hs cabinet had misled, the people, the Congress, the UN and world opinion and started a war on false pretenses. The administration then went public about the intelligence failure. There was a great deal of intelligence that indicated that there were no Iraq nuclear program but these never reached the President, the military or the public. In addition, the intelligence agencies have missed some really major events, like the fall of the Soviet Union or the Chinese Communist victory in the Chinese Civil war. But intelligence is not an exact science; mistakes are inevitable, The politicians using the intelligence tend to think that intelligence estimates are more certaini than estimates can be. However the CIA in particular has had periods of rogue and illegal activities just which cause many citizens ro distrust them. They have illegally investigated Americans, actually conducted experiments with chemical weapons in American cities without any permission or authority, violated American law in the way they treat prisoners,and destroyed evidence, broken the law by conducting activities that Congress and the President had explicitly forbid. The FBI has also broken the law and spied on Americans who were critical of the government, and slandered the reputations of some Americans by “leaking” information that oftn was not even true. So the current intelligence have to bear the burden of their predecessors, but because of the secrecy, cannot take advantage of all the wonderful accomplishments and great sacrifices of many members of the intelligence agencies.

Many politicians had been complaining that the CDC and NIH had not trained more community hospital staffs in infectious disease protection techniques when the Ebola problem came to America. However, the budgets for these kinds of activities had been cut back each of the recent previous years. Lee made the assumption that Congress wanted government to work. In actuality there was a strong core of legislators in that Congress, who wanted government to fail so that citizens would tire of spending money on failures and thereby shrink the size of government. The members of Congress who wanted government to be effective however at that time had other more dramatic uses of money that training and capacity building of local hospitals.

While this may have been true in some European nations, many disagree completely with this assertion for America. They point to the thousands of laws passed by Congress to cut back or diminish the power that they had earlier given the agency. These counter-examples to Hayek’s view are particularly evident after most wars. What often does happen is that Congress votes a temporary power to a government agency, and when the temporary power time is coming to an end, many citizens and officials are so happy with the result of granting the power, that the power is then granted permanently, sometimes to the distress of some legislators who voted for the power with the understanding that it would be temporary. However, Congress may, and often does, change its collective mind. Coercion to Hayek includes for example, taxation if there are criminal penalties for failure to pay the tax or regulation where a government agency may require or prohibit certain behavior of a business or individual and most people would agree that even in a democracy there are coercive aspects of much government activity.

This is not unique to government but exists in most corporations large enough to have bureaucracies.