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Bureaucracy'This Tyranny Is Coming From Upstairs' by Steven Miller
But historically, the word has a technical meaning. And
increasingly that meaning applies right here in Nevada. Aristotle classified tyranny as the form of government where a single
individual has authority not limited by prescribed conditions. Under that definition, wide
expanses of modern government are tyrannical, because increasingly government agencies
have hidden purposes that are not officially acknowledged. Often such large hidden agendas operate behind government licensing
operations. A very common one is simply keeping whole classes of people out of business.
The barely winked-at goal is to keep the market—whichever one it is—doctors,
lawyers, hairdressers, you name it—restricted to “our guys,” whoever they
happen at the moment to be. Bureaucrats of course love the unfettered power they get under these arrangements. And established interests love being able to sic the bureaucrats on new competitors. Yet these “understandings” are the corruption of public life. A classic instance is the situation many small Clark County waste-recycling companies face. Because these small firms compete with the county’s mammoth Republic Silver State Disposal monopoly for construction and other waste, they regularly find defense in depth when they go to the county’s licensing and other departments. It’s a Catch-22 worthy of Joe Heller. If the companies operate
without business licenses, they quickly receive citations and fines. But if they apply for
licenses and permits, they find their path through the county agencies barricaded,
detoured and sniper-equipped at every turn. Sometimes bureaucrats ignorant of
constitutional freedoms lecture on how only Republic Silver State—which fights the
recycling state lawmakers have asked for—is “authorized” to pick up
materials at Clark County construction sites. Perhaps because most of the construction-site clean-up companies in
the Las Vegas Valley are Hispanic, no reports of their plight seem to make it into the
media. Recent immigrants from Mexico—often already too-familiar with government
agencies that illegally serve entrenched power—rarely make a public fuss. NPRI tracked down the details from various sources, including the son
of a family now in the valley for three decades. “I’m going strictly by what I’ve experienced myself,”
says Juan, who asked that his full name not be used. “Each different agency—from business license, to zoning, to
the health department – even public response—seems to have its own criteria to
follow. There’s no standardization of ‘what means what,’” he says. At the root of what he identifies as “a political mess” is
a monopoly-granting “franchise agreement” between Clark County and the garbage
monopoly—as interpreted by uneasy bureaucrats. “That paper has muddled every aspect of trying to get a license—from
zoning to business license,” says Juan. “Even the DA is hesitant to make a
judgment regarding that document.” “It’s all hearsay among all these different agencies. They
interpret it the way they’ve heard it is.” The evidence is that no bureaucrat wants to cross Republic Silver
State—or its elected proxies on the commission. Sometimes the clerks virtually admit what they’re doing is
unfair, says Juan. “When you talk to them behind closed doors, certain people, they
tell you, ‘Well, this is coming from upstairs.’ I’ve had that [said] on
many occasions.” Some county departments have ticketed the small companies, only to
lose when the case gets to court, said Juan. Other sources agreed. Nevertheless, the Clark
County bureaucrats keep taking their lead from the self-interested garbage company. “It’s been told to us on more than one occasion,” says
Juan, “that they [county officials] want everything to go into the landfill.”
Republic Silver State owns the private Apex landfill and charges a minimum of $160 per
truck “tipping” there. “They’ve got people telling us that they don’t want to
stop recycling,” says Juan, “but all the same, they want to make it so
unprofitable you can’t get it done. What they’re telling us is that we’d
have to have a different box [at each construction site] for each type of recyclable
material—one for cardboard, one for wood, one for metal, one for plastics. “We’ve told [the county officials] it can’t happen,”
says Juan, “[and] they even have said they know it can’t happen—[that]
nobody can do it. Not even Silver State themselves could do it.” Or even tries to. Instead, the garbage monopoly gets county officials
to use their discretionary powers to harass the small businesses, simply because they
recycle, rather than truck everything to the monopoly’s landfill. Whenever individuals exercise authority unlimited by Aristotle’s “prescribed conditions”—read, constitutional limits—government degenerates quickly into a tool of the powerful. NJ Steven Miller is the managing editor of Nevada Journal. He can be contacted at sm@npri.org.
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