When the sovereign turns its power against its own servants

The Guardian reports a troubling picture inside the Department of Homeland Security: six-hour polygraph sessions, forced reassignments, and what the outlet describes as a campaign of fear directed at federal workers — alongside the agencies' intensified action against some of the most vulnerable people in the country. I was not present for these events, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the institutional question they raise is one I spent a great deal of my life examining: what happens to a public body when obedience is extracted by terror rather than secured by legitimate authority?

In The Wealth of Nations I argued that the sovereign has three great duties — defense, the administration of justice, and the provision of certain public works and institutions that no private interest will fund. The administration of justice is not merely about courts and contracts between merchants; it extends to the relationship between the state and all those who live under it, including its own officers. A justice system that operates through intimidation of witnesses, arbitrary punishment, and the suspension of ordinary procedural protections is not administering justice — it is administering fear. These are not the same thing, and the confusion between them is a very old error of very ambitious governments.

Consider the workman in my pin factory. He is productive because he has a settled expectation of what his labor will earn and what rules govern his conduct. Deprive him of that certainty — tell him that any morning he may be summoned to a six-hour interrogation, or reassigned without cause, or made to feel that his livelihood depends on the mood of a superior rather than on law — and you have destroyed the very foundation of productive cooperation. This is as true in a public agency as in any manufactory. Fear is a poor substitute for institutional design.

There is a second injury described by The Guardian: the harm visited upon immigrants, whom the outlet describes as among the most vulnerable people subject to this machinery. I will say plainly what I argued in my own century: the free movement of labor is as natural a liberty as the free movement of goods, and restrictions on it carry costs that fall hardest on those least able to bear them. The merchant who petitions for protection from foreign competition is at least honest about his self-interest. A system that pursues the vulnerable under the banner of order while demoralizing the very officers charged with upholding that order has lost the thread of the argument entirely.

The deeper question — and it is always the institutional question — is this: what framework of law, oversight, and accountability disciplines the exercise of executive power? In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I argued that sympathy — the capacity to imagine oneself in another's position — is the moral foundation of any just social order. An institution that has systematically suppressed sympathy among its own officers, that has replaced the impartial spectator's judgment with the demand for loyalty to a superior's will, has not merely become inefficient. It has become morally disordered. The remedy is not a different set of officers. It is the restoration of the institutional framework — independent oversight, clear rules of procedure, protection for those who report abuses — that makes honest public service possible in the first place.