Three-Letter Hate

The Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the current focus of leftist ire. Purportedly despised because of heavy-handed tactics and over-broad action (with some justification), it is actually being targeted by progressive taste-makers and narrative-dictators because it is the mechanism by which Trump is undoing the Democrats’ decades-long plan to flood the nation with migrants and thus permanently (they hope) tip the electoral scales in their favor.

In yet another demonstration that Trump remains an epic troll, he ha proposed renaming ICE as National Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka NICE, just to make its foes ‘not-NICE.’

As I mentioned, there are legitimate gripes about ICE enforcement tactics and targets. However, from what I see, its biggest detractors use those as stalking horses to mask their opposition to the entire enterprise.

That’s fine. Everyone tries to find the path of least resistance in advocacy.

My interest today is not ICE per se, but rather the selective nature of criticism of the government and its seemingly bottomless pit of bureaucracies. This was brought to mind by a Facebook ad for libertarian-themed T-shirts.

I was quite tickled by the one deriding a different federal agency: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), more commonly known as ATF.

And I was simultaneously prompted to note that the stereotypical anti-ICE protester is quite likely to be very pro-ATF, given that ATF has long been chock-full of people extremely interested in curtailing Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

The stereotypical libertarian, on the other hand, is likely to have a dim view of both, and then some.

Consider this quip by Milton Friedman:

Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.

It suggests two things: that most government is useless or worse, and that there is a ridiculous amount of government.

Friedman refers to what many call “three-letter agencies,” even though many (such as FEMA, USAID) break the pattern. A similar term, “alphabet agencies,” refers to the 69 offices created by FDR during the New Deal.

Friedman was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because he did feel that some pieces of the government bureaucratic sprawl should be kept. When queried about the 15 cabinet departments (within which all the three-letter agencies exist), he was quite clear in which he’d keep and which he’d toss.

The short list of keepers?

Defense, Justice, State, Treasury.

Interior only until all federally owned land was sold off.

Some functions of other agencies (e.g. Energy) should be rolled up into these few, and some others should be reduced in size and scope, e.g. Health and Human Services has a legitimate role in matters of contagion.

The clip covers 13 of the 15, omitting Homeland Security and Veterans’ Affairs. As to the latter, other sources indicate Friedman believe that it should only be kept long enough to pay vets out via lump-sum. As to the former, the interview pre-dated the creation of DHS, but I figure Friedman would have rolled up some of its functions into the keepers and done away with the rest.

As to immigration?

There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state, but in a welfare state it is a different story: the supply of immigrants will become infinite.

Friedman understood the moral hazard associated with providing financial support to those who would come to the US, and he and I share(d) the view that an open immigration policy must be predicated on the deconstruction of the welfare state.

All that said, I return to the crux of the matter.

Within those fifteen cabinet departments, there are 441 agencies (or perhaps a few more).

There is little doubt in my mind that most of those agencies could be eliminated, with the sprinkling of things they do that are legitimately within the purview of our Constitution and its enumerated powers allocated to the few agencies that should be kept.

There is zero doubt in my mind that bad behaviors can be found in every single agency. This should make our default opinion one of skepticism and suspicious watchfulness, rather than “I like this agency because it does some stuff I like” deference.

Worth noting is that “stuff I like” is almost always the spending or handing out of Other People’s Money, the infringement of the liberties they don’t care about, or the coercion of people they don’t like.

So, rather than liking the ones that your counterparts hate, why not hate them all until they prove they deserve otherwise?