The Voice of the People Bureaucracy has been growing since the moment it was created in the United

States and that is not good. It is not good for the nation and it is not good for our ideals. The United States was founded on the ground of freedom, liberty, and the voice of the people. The bureaucracy is not helping those ideals; it is actually doing the opposite. Bureaucracy is taking away the essential idea the United States was found under: the voice of the people or the power of the people. Each day, each moment that passes bureaucracy is taking over another aspect in the citizen's life, thus further removing the people of United States from their central government. That is what our founding fathers feared when they created the United States and its government. Their fear is coming true slowly so no one notices it, and stops the process and the ones that notices it, does not want to stand out. Bureaucracy is not only taking away the voice of the people and further removing people from the national government, it is also growing. People are so dependent on it that it will be next to impossible to remove it from our government when the time comes. Before the Constitution was ratified, there was a debate between the Antifederalist and the Federalist about whether they should have a Bill of Rights. Both side brought up some good points but as it can be seen the Antifederalist won the round. Even though this debate is done and over with, we still have the same problems. Both side agreed on creating a government controlled by the people but this is not the case today. People are not the one that the controls the government; it is the special interest groups and the bureaucracy agencies that are controlling the government. People are so uninformed about the government that they are unaware of the basic events that are taking place. It is not the media's fault or the people's; it is the government's

fault because the government has created so many bureaucracies that it has gotten so big and complex, people do not have the mind or the time to understand all its processes and functions. So is bureaucracy aiding the people when there are too many? In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln said, "That this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."1 So does that mean this nation never had a birth because when Lincoln said this quote there was a bureaucracy, maybe not as big as it is today but it was there, since bureaucracy is not of the people or helping the people? It might have been created for the people but it is not actually doing a lot for the people. People are getting more frustrated with it more than anything. It is slowing down the process of what the people want. It is also creating more problems and more controversies. Bureaucracy is also limiting people's freedom. It seems like the government created the bureaucracy to restrict people's freedom and not give them the freedom that they were meant to have when the Founding Fathers created the government. Most likely the Founding Fathers never imagined that our central government will become so big and powerful and that is why they never thought of it. They were all about states and people's rights. James Madison, the father of our constitution, wrote in the Federalist Paper, "There are two methods of curing the mischiefsthe one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects."2 Bureaucracy is a mischief because all it does is "turns normal people, granted a smidgen of authority, into rule-bound technocrats and twists candid conversation about real issues into jargon-laden gobbledygook. In short, bureaucracy gums up the works."3 So should 1 The Gettysburg Address, 1863. 2 O'Connor, Karen and Larry J. Sabato. American Government: continuity ad change. 2006 ed. New York:
Pearson Education, Inc., 2006 page 733. 3 Welch, Jack, and Suzy Welch. "Death to Bureaucracy." Business Week (24 Dec. 2007): 96. MAS Ultra - School Edition. EBSCO. University of Nevada, Reno Library, Reno, NV. 27 Mar. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ulh&AN=27940650&site=src-live>.

we remove it since the federal government cannot control the effects it has on the citizens of the United States? Well it seems like James Madison thought that was case but what he did not take into account is that a mischief could be so big and people dependent--the bureaucracy--that to destroy it would annihilate the country too. "Declaring war on bureaucracy is not unlike declaring war on, say, cancer or drugs. You know going in that total victory is impossible and that the battle will be never-ending."4 This quote says it all. Even though the bureaucracy is taking away the voice of the people from the government, the people have no chance of total victory if they do decide to declare a war against it. The people "will never be able to eliminate every vestige of deadening bureaucracy"5 because it is not unconstitutional and the President and the Congress needs it to carry out their duties but that does not mean it has to be so vast. It does not mean it should take away people's power in the government. The central government needs to curve its power little more than it has done in the past years. It needs to give the power back to people instead of taking it away from the people by expanding the bureaucracy. The United States Constitution's preamble begins with "we the people of the United States6 that would mean people have a vast say in what the government says and do but that is not the case even though the House of Representative represents the people because one representative represents so many people today that not all the voices are heard. The ones that are heard are the wealth, high officials and not the people living in the slums. People are the
4 Welch, Jack, and Suzy Welch. "Death to Bureaucracy." Business Week (24 Dec. 2007): 96. MAS Ultra - School
Edition. EBSCO. University of Nevada, Reno Library, Reno, NV. 27 Mar. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ulh&AN=27940650&site=src-live>.

5 Welch, Jack, and Suzy Welch. "Death to Bureaucracy." Business Week (24 Dec. 2007): 96. MAS Ultra - School
Edition. EBSCO. University of Nevada, Reno Library, Reno, NV. 27 Mar. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ulh&AN=27940650&site=src-live>.

6 The Preamble of the United States Constitution, 1783.

reason a government is created; it is not for the land. Without people there would not a nation. Citizens are the essential ingredients to a nation because they are what make a nation so great or so undesirable. So why is government restricting the citizens' freedom more than it is already when it citizens are the ones to be govern and are ones who creates it in the first place. It's because of power. Power is like greed--a person wants more and more. There is never enough. The road bureaucracy is heading to tyranny because what it controls in the government system has the power of repression. The enormousness of it is huge that most likely the Congress and the President does not check all its parts. Because it is so huge, it has more chance of corruptness and hiding works that should not be done in the first place or is unconstitutional. The preamble of the Declaration of Independence begins with "when in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another.7 Both of the documents that were the foundation of the United States have the word people in it and emphasis on it. Both of them put the power of the government in the hand of the people but that power is not in the hand of people today; it is misplaced among the bureaucracy agencies. What has the bureaucracy done for the people of the United States for the past years? They have not done anything of significance that got the attention of the people The Federal Governments answer to everything now days is to create "impersonal and bureaucratic program, one that will be lacking in the very human quality so essential"8 and that is not the way to deal with the citizens who are the main ingredients of this country. We need something with human quality that people can relate but "Washington is essential in a double sense: as a source of the considerable funds need to mount a campaignand as a place for coordination, for planning, and 7 The Preamble of the Declaration of Independence, 1776. 8 Harrington, Michael. The Other America. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1993, page 170.

the establishment of national standard."9 The people do not look to the states, cities, or private agencies to solve the nation's problems such as poverty, unemployment, universal health care because these institutions cannot do anything to resolve them. "The cities are not now capable of dealing...and each they become even less capable. As the middle class flees the central urban area, as various industries decentralize, the tax base of the American metropolis shrinks. At the same time, the social and economic problems with which the city must deal are on the rise. Thus, there is not a major city in the United States that is today capableon its own. On the contrary, the high cost...is dragging the cities down."10 A person might think if a city cannot solve the problems, the state could but the state government has its own problems to deal. "The state governments in this country have a political peculiarity that renders them incapable of dealing with the problemThey are, for the most part, dominated by conservative rural elements. In every state with a big industrial population, the gerrymander has given the forces of rural conservatism two or three votes per person. So it is that the state legislatures usually take more money out of the areas than they put back in to them."11 That leaves the private agencies and the problem with them is that they do not have the funds or the means to deal with this kind of problems. If no one is available to protect the people's rights and voice, what will happen to them? "They [will] drop out of sight and out of mind; they [will be] without their own political voice"12 and that will happen if the Federal Government keeps on expanding its jurisdiction and its power over the people by creating more bureaucracy. Before we know it, we will have the tyranny that 9 Harrington, Michael. The Other America. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1993, page 171. 10 Harrington, Michael. The Other America. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1993, page 170. 11 Harrington, Michael. The Other America. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1993, page 170-171. 12 Harrington, Michael. The Other America. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1993, page 174.

we fought so much against and the democratic government we created will be destroyed. Along with the government our ideas and our dream of a free nation with a "government of the people, by the people, for the people"13 will "perish from the earth."14 What are we to do? We cannot eliminate all of the bureaucracy since it controls too much of our life. If we were to destroy it our economy will become unstable because Federal Reserve which is a bureaucracy created to help keep the economy stable so we do not have another Great Depression will be eliminated also. We need to compromise and keep the bureaucracy agencies that are really important to our country, government, and people, and purge the ones that deal with minor details. We are not in a Great Depression so we do not need a powerful centralized government to bring the nation back on its foot as was the case during Franklin D. Roosevelts terms in the White House. We are also losing money by having a huge bureaucracy because funds are needed to create them and keep them functioning. So by having a small, simple bureaucracy, we save funds and have the time to check it so there is not any corruptness. We also give the power and the voice back to the people where it was in the first place and should be.

13 The Gettysburg Address, 1863. 14 Ibis