Grand Rapids Reporter

The “unaccountable elite” is running the United States, author Jim Copland told WJR's "The Frank Beckmann Show."

“It’s not that elections don’t matter -- elections matter a lot,” said Copland, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and author of the book “The Unelected: How an Unaccountable Elite is Governing America."

But the version of government taught in schools -- three branches of government, with Congress making laws, the executive branch enforcing them the judicial brand interpreting them -- is not exactly how it works, according to Copland.

“Instead we've got 2 million federal employees with vast discretion, in terms of rule-making and the enforcement and interpretation of the laws,” Copland told Beckmann.

Then there are 1.3 million private lawyers filing lawsuits, which is “nothing more than using the government’s monopoly on force to redistribute money from one party to another," Copland said on the show.

The U.S. legal system, although necessary, is much more expensive than that of other developed countries, he said.

“Then we have all these local officials -- 50 states, 89,000 municipalities -- which are not only governing themselves but are often taking actions that govern the rest of us, who don’t get to vote on them,” he told Beckmann.

Unelected officials are making lots of decisions that affect the lives of ordinary citizens, Copland pointed out.

“It’s the swamp in Washington, but it’s also the swamp in courthouses all around America, in statehouses and local governments, etc.,” he said. “It’s a difficult thing to turn around.”

Congress passes open-ended legislation, leaving details up to bureaucrats, said Copland.

“Now we have an estimated 300,000 federal crimes on the books, 98% of which were never voted on by Congress at all,” said Copland.

This has departed from the original design of the U.S. Constitution, the author said.

“The Supreme Court has largely rubber-stamped large pieces of this,” he said on the radio program.

Small businesses, such as family farmers, often feel the brunt of the vast array of regulations, Copland said.

“Big businesses hire teams of lawyers and compliance departments to try and follow all of this,” said Copland. “Ordinary folks can’t do that, so they really are at the whim of these impersonal forces. And the people they vote on can't really help them that much. There's not an easy way to turn this around, because a lot of this state apparatus just happens independently of the electoral process."