Since taking office, President Barack Obama has made creating “czars” a top priority. He has created a Car Czar, a Cybersecurity Czar and a Compensation Czar, just to name a few. Some counts put the total at 15 new Czars since taking office. No doubt we could soon have a Health Care Czar. In the October 2004 issue of The Freeman (link) Lawrence Reed suggested that a free people should be horrified at the very choice of terms, let alone the prospects of giving political appointees such power over industry. Here is an excerpt from that article:

The media not only lap it up, but they dish out more of their own—often conferring the “czar” title on officials whom even the government isn’t brash enough to label that way. While browsing the Internet, I came across an article from the January 20 Berkeley Daily Planet with a headline that caught my eye: “Bush Homeless Czar Pays a Visit.”

It wasn’t about a government official without a home. It was about the President’s homelessness czar, in town to promote “the development of 10-year plans to end chronic homelessness.” Other stories I found referred to a “timber czar,” a “cybersecurity czar,” a “health care czar,” and a “regulatory czar,” to cite but a few examples.

My problem with all of this goes beyond the notion of hiring yet another bureaucrat. It’s the use of the term “czar” itself to refer to anybody at all in what is supposed to be a free society. Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and the others who risked their lives to fashion a constitutional republic must be turning in their graves. Just as George Washington rejected a suggestion he be named a king, so should any self-respecting, freedom-loving American citizen eschew any offer to be a “czar” over anything or anybody.

In his book Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen, James Bovard laments what this czarist fetish says about the state of American thinking: “Americans of earlier generations would be as shocked by the current adulatory use of the term ‘czar’ as contemporary Americans should be shocked of the use of ‘fuehrer’ as a compliment for a political leader.” Bovard cites an attorney who, in an 1895 case, condemned a particular tax as granting sweeping powers to the federal government “worthy of a Czar of Russia proposing to reign with undisputed and absolute power. . . .”

The origin of the word is “Caesar” from the ancient Roman autocrat Julius Caesar, who arrogated great power to himself and helped bring an end to the Roman republic. Later emperors embraced his name as their title; to be a “Caesar” was to possess almost limitless, life-and-death authority over the rest of society. In more modern times we think of a “czar” as a tyrant of pre-1917 Russia. Look it up in any thesaurus and you’ll find synonyms such as “usurper,” “despot” and “oppressor.”

Words say a lot about a culture. Americans of 1900 never referred to one of their own as a “czar” because they understood the term. Because they generally embraced liberty and limited government, they knew that it was pejorative. No respectable American of that day would have accepted the title, and no job at any level of government at that time even pretended to bestow czarist-like authority. Americans of today haven’t forgotten what the term means.

Sadly, they simply put far more faith in powerful, centralized government than did their ancestors. Their acceptance of the term “czar” is symptomatic of the same shift in thinking that has given us a government that commands a share of our lives and personal income many times what it claimed in 1900.

One hopeful sign of the prospects for liberty would be a widespread revulsion at the very thought of a fellow citizen possessing either a position or a title such as the one we’re discussing here. Let’s pray for the day when Americans tell their leaders in no uncertain terms: “Give us no more czars! Give us no pharaohs, emperors, shoguns, sheikhs, sachems, commissars, or potentates of any kind! Just give us good and limited government, and leave the rest to us!”