The photograph of Elián González looking into the muzzle of a Heckler & Koch MP5 has not created much of a stir, as the inevitable polls show. Cynical as I may be, I found this rather disturbing, and not just because of the terror inflicted on a six-year-old who had already endured his share of hardships. The picture represents a government out of control.

As Miss Reno declared that she had no regret concerning this matter, the usual Clinton flunkies came before television cameras to explain how the picture was not what it seemed. First, they said, it is nigh impossible to determine from the photograph whether the MP5 was exactly pointed at Elián's chest. Second, everyone could see that the INS agent's index finger was only near the trigger, and not on it. And third, one of Miss Reno's deputies said she cried on his shoulder, an indisputable proof that she is sensitive and meant no harm. So what was the fuss about? Shouldn't it be clear that the machine pistols were there only for show?

Of course, all that is rubbish. An INS agent properly trained in the use of firearms does not point a weapon about anyone unless he is ready to take out a life. This is the first principle of weapon instruction. That his finger was only "near" the trigger does not mean much. In a very small fraction of a second, this finger can release automatic fire at the rate of eight hundred rounds per minute. A machine pistol is not for show. Luck has it that no one was shot.

I have serious doubts about Miss Reno's sensitivity and saintly intentions. The image of a duty-bound, honorable Attorney General who does what's right against her personal emotions does not jibe with the record. In the Waco and Ruby Ridge confrontations, she demonstrated a special ability to turn minor discords into deadly shoot-outs where tax-supported firepower could easily prevail. These actions spell out the clear message that anyone who cares about limb or life should better comply with Miss Reno's and Mr. Clinton's whims. Now, constitutional scholars including political friends of the president convincingly argue that only a specific court order could have authorized the Miami raid and that there was no such court order. I don't doubt that the Attorney General will take full responsibility for the deed, as she did for the Waco disaster, but she will not resign and Mr. Clinton will not fire her for the simple reason that she is just executing his orders in these and other matters. Office might makes right.

The pattern set by this administration in the use of paramilitary force against citizens is troubling, and so is the concomitant trend of militarization of federal and local law enforcement units. At the same time, considerable backdoor efforts supported by the federal government to discourage legal firearm ownership, along with much nonchalance in the pursuit of criminals who violate gun laws, send a disquieting signal. Big Government has been on the march for some time, and anything in the way has had to give. This should not surprise anyone willing to take a look at the history and politics of the past seventy years. The idea that bigger government knows best started in the 1930s when the president said that he would take care of everything and that the only thing that the citizenry should fear was fear itself. The alphabet soup of Washington agencies that followed planted the seeds of an ever-growing forest. The post-WW2 era showed a few bright spots, including overdue civil-rights laws, but, in less than two decades, these became the grossly distorted directives ensuring that equal life outcomes, not opportunities, should be enforced by a bureaucracy practically unaccountable and bent on social re-engineering.

Political correctness is no longer a joke. It is governmental indoctrination that starts in the schools, complete with its newspeak, bogus science, revisionist history, and general witlessness. It is also pervasively enforced in the workplace, where anyone can take offense at heterodox opinions and wield the real threat of costly lawsuits. It is also the fear of lawsuits that warps hiring policies to conform to government quotas on sex and race. So, cowed CEOs contribute to the spreading of Big-Brother propaganda through sensitivity-training sessions and assorted thought-reshaping devices.

Successful corporations must toe a narrow line to avoid court actions initiated by government agencies that know better how business must be run, edict stifling regulations, and have the power to wreck fortunes, all for no good purpose. Has anyone taken a good look at the costs incurred in the 1970s by IBM in a ten-year antitrust suit without merit, not only in dollars, but in technological restraint and consequent losses of employment and wages? Microsoft is now the target of the same bureaucratic egalitarianism to which success is suspect.

Perhaps even more insidious is the way government uses taxation to accrue power. Even though the marginal tax rates are lower now than they were forty years ago, statistics show that income taxes have reached an alarmingly large fraction of the GDP and new levels of progressivity. As the top five-percent of wage earners shoulder a whopping fifty-percent of the federal income-tax burden, a majority of the population that pays little or no tax views the government as the munificent provider of "free" benefits and, by voting accordingly, quietly keeps transferring more power to the mighty benefactor.

Finally, we have the abuse of presidential executive orders. Under various sanctimonious pretexts of conservation, huge tracts of land have been confiscated with little regard for individual or state rights. One of the latest such landgrabs has prevented the exploitation of large reserves of low-sulfur coal that would have greatly contributed to our production of clean energy and brought prosperity to the poor southern counties of Utah. That Utah overwhelmingly voted for the Republican ticket in the last presidential election did not play any part in the deed, or so we are told.

Are subjugation, intimidation, interventionism, extortion, barefaced propaganda, and unfettered accumulation of power in the nature of the government prescribed by the constitution? I think not. Mr. Clinton and his associates have pushed the trend of imperial government to new limits, not only for questionable activism, but also by demonstrating that the political weight of office can be used as a shield against the consequences of malpractice and personal misdeeds. Evidently, too many congressmen have been complicit in such excesses either to serve dictatorial agendas of their own---the Progressive Caucus is a case in point---or simply out of pusillanimous self-interest. Meanwhile, the same politicians hypocritically deplore the growing popular cynicism or disaffection engendered by their own shenanigans and bloody lies.

Contrary to current clichés, the danger of fascism does not come from a bunch of grubby Idaho militiamen in camouflage fatigues, but from a newfangled fascio, a crowd of magniloquent Washington artistes in three-piece suits with a vicarious taste for Heckler & Koch machine pistols.