Offered Without Comment 28

From the beginning of an article by Bruce Pardy at Brownstone Institute Journal:

Many citizens of the West believe that they live in free societies, or something close. But as time goes on, public authorities increasingly insist on having a say in everything. People cannot build things on their own land without permits. They cannot run businesses without approvals and inspections. They cannot give advice without professional designations. They cannot educate their children outside of state-mandated curricula. They cannot hire employees without triggering a myriad of workplace and tax requirements. They cannot produce and sell milk, cheese, or eggs without a license. They cannot earn money, spend money, or hold property without being taxed, and then taxed again. 

Jeffrey Tucker recently described three layers of omnipotent managerial technocracy. The deep state, he suggested, consists of powerful and secretive central government agencies in the security, intelligence, law enforcement, and financial sectors. The middle state is a myriad of ubiquitous administrative bodies — agencies, regulators, commissions, departments, municipalities, and many more — run by a permanent bureaucracy. The shallow state is a plethora of consumer-facing private or semi-private corporations, including banks, Big Media, and huge commercial retail companies, which governments support, protect, subsidize, and pervert. The three layers work together. [reformatting into two paragraphs]