Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Bovard’s line is engineered to make “government expansion” feel less like a budgetary debate and more like a neighborhood menace. He doesn’t argue policy; he stages an ambience of threat. “Perils” is doing the heavy lifting: it recasts ordinary bureaucratic encounters as hazards you “face in daily lives,” folding the state into the category of predators rather than providers. That framing is classic Bovard, a libertarian polemicist who has spent decades chronicling federal overreach and the quiet ways agencies can grind people down without a headline.

The specificity of “IRS agents” and “child support services” is strategic. The IRS evokes fear of audit, penalty, and opaque rules; child support enforcement evokes a different kind of dread, mixing family breakdown, coercion, and the feeling of being trapped by a system that treats people as case numbers. Pairing them suggests a broad spectrum of vulnerability: the professional class that worries about tax compliance and the working-class guy terrified of arrears. The subtext is coalition-building through anxiety.

Then comes the insinuation that matters most: agencies “often have little or no legal restraints on their power.” That’s an absolutist charge, but it’s rhetorically potent because it doesn’t require a reader to know administrative law; it invites them to recall any moment of Kafkaesque helplessness and label it tyranny. Contextually, it sits in the post-9/11, post-Patriot Act era of expanding administrative and surveillance capacity, when “the state” could plausibly feel both everywhere and unaccountable. Bovard’s intent is less to persuade the undecided than to harden a moral intuition: bigger government isn’t just inefficient; it’s dangerous.