http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2015/10/27/progressive-economics-two-americas-bureaucratic-arrogation-and-santa-claus-socialism/

Bureaucracy is suffocating America; yet, the bureaucrats themselves are doing quite well. It seems that the more they asphyxiate our economy, the more prosperous the bureaucratic class becomes.

I have written before about "two Americas" and the growing divide between the governing elite and the rest of us. As the graph below shows, the economic gap between private-sector and public-sector has continued to widen during the Obama presidency. In fact, when one subtracts the vilified "1%"—the billionaires and multimillionaires—from the private sector, then the average private-sector worker is falling even further behind our public-sector counterparts.

As the 20th-century economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in his 1944 book, Bureaucracy (immensely illuminating and every bit as relevant today as then), bureaucracy is the indispensable institution by which a government exercises control over people. No coterie of power-hungry individuals (e.g., Hitler, Goebbels and Goering, or Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev et al.) can impose a tyranny without an army of faceless deputies to implement it.

In the U.S. today, the advance of the progressive ideology and political dominance has produced the increasing bureaucratization of life. We already may have passed the point of no return in the United States in the drift toward bureaucratic tyranny. Our supine Congress has become increasingly irrelevant. Unelected bureaucrats promulgate more than ten times as many of the rules that Americans must obey as do our elected representatives. Indeed, federal bureaucracies are becoming increasingly bold and brazen as they arrogate increasingly sweeping powers over entire sectors of our economy to themselves. Examples: the EPA and theBLM are restructuring the domestic energy; the FCC has hijacked the Internet; the NLRB wants to control where private businesses (Boeing) build factories, and is attacking the franchise business model; the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (both created by the Dodd-Frank law a mere five years ago) are capturing and cartelizing "systemically important financial institutions."

Interestingly, Mises argued that the bureaucratization of daily life, which leads to a suffocation of liberty and economic stagnation, though hugely important to our future welfare, is not the central question confronting us. From Bureaucracy again: "The main matter is: Capitalism or Socialism? Which?" This is the existential question facing America and the world today, perhaps even more than it was during the Cold War.