The FedGov in DC spends literally billions of dollars each year building, maintaining, rebuilding, replacing, naming (and renaming), renting, and more to FedGov office buildings to house the millions of bureaucrats and jackbooted thugs (2.87 million at last count) that infest or occupy this beautiful land and pester our people and most of the rest of the world.

When once the only presence of the FedGov in most towns was a post office – and that often in the corner of a store – that is ancient history today. Today we not only have the generally practical offices for the Natural Resource Conservation Service and local military recruiting offices, we have grandiose federal courthouses, ubiquitous Social Security offices, and dozens more places for the parasites of the alphabet agencies to rest their weary heads after stealing and intimidating and pursuing citizens.

Consider the BATFE Washington DC headquarters building, shown below.

Even lovers of government such as the Washingtonian.com have berated the building for its “bunker-like” appearance. Gee, that might be fitting, huh?

Named for a hispanic ATF agent (Rios, as I recall) killed when a drug buy/sting operation went bad in Miami decades ago, this grandiose and cookie-cutter style bunker resembles dozens or even hundreds of other massive buildings. And houses an amazing number of bureaucrats and computer systems designed to regulate (or prevent) Americans from exercising rights which the Constitution states “shall not be infringed.” Or objects that are not even addressed (or were briefly addressed and then removed) from that document. (Beverage alcohol.)

Reason magazine’s J.D. Tuccille stated, “The nicest thing you can say about the ATF is that it’s an unserious and unaccountable bureaucracy. Often it’s explicitly contemptible, such as during the Fast-and-Furious gun-walking scandal, and its setting up mentally disabled youths to take the fall during gun-and-drug stings. After those abuses of individual rights and public trust, the failings of the National Disposal Branch  [(NDB), formerly the National Firearms and Ammunition Destruction (NFAD) Branch,] almost pale by comparison … the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives should be abolished, and its employees sent into the world to seek honest jobs in the private sector, if anybody will have them.”

This magnificent, luxurious, if ugly, structure is far from alone in advertising the power, ubiquitous presence, and cost of the FedGov. And like Versailles and the wealthy palaces of French aristocrats before the Revolution of 1789, they are both symbols and objects of hatred. They are literally built on the money extorted by government from the sweat of workers, taxpayers, whom they claim to serve. They also serve to glorify their occupants, to make them feel powerful, to allow them to look with distain and worse on the citizens in whose name they supposedly act.

The nation is filled with buildings like this one. Magnificent edifices raised to glorify government and done on the backs of taxpayers, present and future. Oh, and more and more designed to defend those powers-that-be and their toadies from the wrath of others. And this does not count the hidden fortresses and hidey-holes to which they can flee from the anger of either American subjects or foreign enemies. (Enemies they have for the most part created by their stupidity and greed for power and wealth.)

Past empires have done something very similar: compare modern Babylon with the paintings of what amazing structures it had. Or Ninevah, now an archeological park inside Mosul. Or the vast ruins seen in Egypt. Or Rome, where only a single important building (the Pantheon) remains in use 1600 years after the (western) Empire fell. (And it was built not with taxpayers’ money but by private donations.)

How long will these monuments to arrogance remain standing? Liberty will survive and thrive: the constructed glories of men? Don’t bet on it.