Enarchs and H.R. 2102

What is H.R. 2102? It's the bill gaining steam to fund and start The United States Public Service Academy. What is an Enarch? To describe it, and them, let's start somewhere else, far away, in the long ago.

In 1940, the French Vichy Government concluded that French glory had faded in the preceding two to twenty years. Their solution was to establish 60 "leadership schools". The infinitive "to lead" and its tenses hadn't been stricken from the language, only from French minds, and the Germans certainly noted the irony.

One of these schools, in the southern Alps, went on to become the model, the great Ecole Nationale d'Administration. It soon became known simply as the ENA. It milled and polished truckloads of civil servants, and dumped them into French society. At first, they were the best and brightest, meritocrats, well-travelled; well-educated in every way.

By the mid 1950's, graduates were simply known as "enarchs", and the process of their advancement known as "enarchization". They filled most senior positions in French civil administration. Their numbers grew, and the story of their subsequent opportunism is complicated. It had a lot to do with the failure of the Fourth Republic, the creation of the Fifth and DeGaulle's 1958 Constitution which favored enarchs as a special political class. The Constitution was drafted by Michael Debre, one of the main architects of the ENA.

Under Debre's Constitution, civil servants could be elected to Parliament. When they left elected office, they could resume their old jobs with full benefits. Their numbers grew because the levers of power could be turned to the benefit of the enarchs as a class. Since the 1970's, it's been estimated that 70 percent of all members of Parliament have been civil servants.

Six of seventeen prime ministers since 1958 have been enarchs. Worse, the nationalization of large companies since 1936 gave enormous influence over business to civil servants. A tradition called "pantoflauge" (slippering) permits enarchs to be loaned to private companies. The end is a petrified mangerial class with its hands clasped to power and the things that sustain it.

What the French started in 1940 and codified in 1958 was the immutable government law of unitended consequences, the awful symmetry that develops when the interests of of the nation are seen to be the same as the interests of government. The goals of government are not the goals of the individual.

Here's where H.R. 2102 comes in. Many Democrats, and a few of the suspect Republicans, have seen the future, and it's Them. They've concocted an American version of the ENA. The United States Public Service Academy. Anyone interested in this monstrosity can resort to Google, and read of the sad formulae for the multiplification of liberals and other world-turners who will gorge at the public trough and manage your life.

You'll find Hillary Clinton on board, and Jim Moran, Biden and Boxer, and before he stopped drinking permanently, Teddy, and the defeated panty-waist CT Republican Chris Shays, and Specter; Sheila Jackson Lee and Conyers and Mikulski and Jim McDermott.

The USPSA is modeled after West Point (laughter here), and designed to produce 5000 graduates a year for $205 million annually. Graduates need to uphold the brain-burning 2.5 GPA in a government curriculum school. They get free education with a five-year public service requirement in "civil service, the public sector and other needed fields". How does the public sector differ from civil service, and on the other side of the looking glass, what are the other "needed fields"?

Such an idea from such people is a cancer on a free society. Civil servants churned out by an intellectual Gulag end up managing everything from Washington DC down to your local transfer station. The bad always drives out the good. H.R. 2102 is being driven in the dark, with the lights out. Pay attention. These criminals, liars, punks and shrews keep a low profile.