Labor Skates, Unelected Bureaucrats, and Party Bosses

Independence Hall, Birthplace of the Constitution. Public Domain Photo Courtesy of the Unelected Bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service.

The privileged organize the powerless by harnessing resentment and greed.

Before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, government in what might be called Western Christendom after the Great Schism of 1054 was by autocrats appointed by God speaking through His representative, the Pope, the highest authority in the Holy Roman Empire. In Eastern Christendom, the Byzantine Empire, God was whispering instructions in the ear of the Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople and so the Emperor ruled by authority of the same God who spoke in Rome.

I doubt this was as confusing to ordinary people at the time as it is now to undergraduate history students trying to keep track of the intrigues in Rome and in Constantinople complicated by threats from outside the Roman Empire by barbarian polytheists. Here in North America, we observe that the Orthodox Church devolved into national orthodox churches with only loose allegiance to the Patriarch.

Our fate was tied to the doings in Rome, where the Pope issued a bull in 1493 called Inter caetera that divided the so-called New World between Castille (later Spain) and Portugal, a division ratified by the Treaty of Tordesillas a year later. Sort of ratified, since the lines drawn by Inter caetera were not exactly the same as the…