Originally Posted by NW Ponderer
... a term used to describe the phenomenon of executive branch administrative agencies exercising the power to create, adjudicate, and enforce their own rules.
I looked it up, too. I have had some experience with rules promulgated by government agencies as a result of needing to implement various laws. For the national government I believe most of those rules are published in the Code of Federal Regulations. Those regulations are not created at the whim of government employees, they have to go through a comprehensive process that includes public input and legal review (some of which I have participated in). For the most part I have been impressed far more often by how well CFR's (as we call them) are written than by finding any gross problems related to their proper implementation of the laws that spawned them.

I have had a few issues with how some bureaucrats have "interpreted" and applied some regulations, but that's a different issue.

Frankly, I don't see how it would be possible for lawmakers to generate the regulations for the laws they pass. They don't have the time, the knowledge, or the setting for doing a job like that.

My spidey sense is telling me that Hatrack is parroting a talking point from ignorant non-conservative radicals and doesn't actually know why he thinks the the "administrative state" is a bad thing, or how it could be "torn down" without completely destroying the government - or what system would be used to implement government in its place.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.
R. Buckminster Fuller