FREDERICK WINSLOW TAYLOR was a business consultant obsessed with scientific precision in everything he did, whether it was a friendly game of tennis or the operation of a steel lathe.

In 1898, Taylor began consulting at a Pennsylvania company named Bethlehem Steel, and he started working on a pet theory. Taylor believed all labor could be reduced to a pure science by breaking each task into a series of discrete, hyper-efficient motions. Any endeavor, according to Taylor, could be reduced to just one-best-way of doing things.

Taylor believed that if laborers were just trained and managed properly, they wouldn’t need to think or use any personal judgment. But more importantly, he believed, properly trained managers could run any organization—of any size— based on an objective science.

While Taylor held himself—and his ideas—in high regard, there was no way he could have predicted how progressive politicians and academics would adopt his one-best-way theory to sell policies that would eventually dominate American government and society.

AROUND THE TURN of that century, Bethlehem Steel had a huge overstock of pig iron bars. Pig iron is a metal used to produce steel. It earned its name because the crude iron is smelt down into fat, round bars that imaginative steelworkers thought resembled pigs.

For years there had been a nation-wide oversupply of pig iron. But when the Spanish-American War sparked a rapid increase in the demand for steel, Bethlehem needed to move 80,000 tons of the stuff as quickly as possible to take advantage of the booming market.

As an efficiency consultant for Bethlehem, Taylor closely observed the men when they loaded the pig iron. The process was exhausting and repetitive. Pick up a pig iron bar from the yard (each weighed 92 pounds), carry it up a ramp, stack it on a train cart, and repeat hundreds of times over.

By his calculations, the workers were loading 12.5 tons of pig iron per man, per day. Taylor thought the men could be much more productive, so he constructed an experiment to determine exactly how much pig iron could be loaded per man, per day.

Armed with a decimal stopwatch, Taylor and a few assistants went down to the yard. As author Matthew Stewart tells it, they “rounded up 10 ‘large, powerful Hungarians’ on the scientific grounds that they looked pretty husky, and in exchange for a bonus, challenged them to load a stack of iron as fast as they could.” The men hustled, running up and down wooden planks to get the cart loaded. And in a short while, the men had loaded 16.5 tons in 14 minutes. So Taylor extrapolated that each man could load 71 tons per day, which Taylor rounded up to 75.

He then lopped off 40% from that figure, to allow for rest and delays. Why 40%? Even Taylor’s admiring biographer, Robert Kanigel, isn’t sure: “The stopwatch timing, the careful ‘observations,’ the pages of numbers and calculations, might feebly suggest ‘science.’ But the 40 percent was sheer witchcraft.”

Taylor believed he was applying science to industry. Stewart argues that such a characterization was a stretch: “Taylor offered a kind of parody of science. He confused the paraphernalia of research—stopwatches and long division—with actual research. The number was the number, however—in Taylor’s mind at least…”

In addition to work yard efficiencies, Taylor’s other purported pig iron experiment breakthrough was the idea that laborers should be “mentally sluggish.” According to Taylor, a laborer with an active mind was actually a hindrance. For Taylor, a “first-class man”—as he put it—for loading pig iron was a man who was strong but dumb. He later wrote that for tasks like this, you could “train an intelligent gorilla.” However, the science of administering Taylor’s techniques was something else altogether. Taylor’s emerging theory (called managerialism) required more than intelligent gorillas. It also needed a special class of intelligent people to oversee them: scientifically trained managers.

He believed his findings extended far beyond loading pig iron. He wrote, “the same principles can be applied with equal force to all social activities,” from the home, to business, to churches, universities…and government itself. In his view, his managerialism was a true science with “laws as exact and as clearly defined” as engineering. Managerialism would produce not only a better worker, but also a person who is able to live better, save money, and become more sober.

Science or not, Taylor’s ideas would go on to make some industries more efficient. Assembly lines and nearly the entire industrial apparatus that allowed the U.S. to defeat Germany and Japan in WWII drew from the same managerialism principles Taylor pioneered.

Where Taylor went wrong, however—perhaps where society went wrong—was assuming that all industries from charities to schools to governments operate like a factory assembly line.

TAYLOR LEFT BETHLEHEM STEEL in 1901, transforming himself from a consulting engineer into an educator and social reformer. By this time, he was 45 years old, and he would spend his remaining years evangelizing managerialism. He wrote papers and gave lectures on what he referred to as a coming “mental revolution” across the country. His ideas were beginning to catch on among engineers and businessmen.

Harvard approached him about converting his lectures into an academic program, thus forming the world’s first MBA program. He lectured there frequently. Similar programs soon followed at Penn State, Cornell, and Purdue. One professor wrote to congratulate him for being “on the track of the only reasonable solution of a great sociological problem.”

Taylor was forming a social movement. And his core claim that managerialism as a science can be applied anywhere dovetailed perfectly with a growing intellectual movement of “progressives.” Progressives openly and actively sought to replace the Founders’ principles of individual liberty with collectivism and top-down planning. Managerialism was the perfect way to sell their ideas.

The progressive movement of the early 20th century is difficult to define. But historian Thomas Leonard found three common principles, some of which are still true of many contemporary progressives.

First, progressives called for society’s “collective will” to take precedence over the rights of individuals. Many progressives studied the work of G. W. F. Hegel, a Prussian philosopher who was highly influential for Karl Marx, among others. According to Hegel, true liberty isn’t individual liberty; true liberty is to subordinate yourself to the government for the greater glory.

Second, they opposed capitalism, which they viewed as disorderly and inefficient. To them, government needed to be centralized so decision-making could be in the hands of smarter, more objective experts. Similarly, managerialism organizes people into two categories: experts called “scientific managers” and laborers.

Third, progressives believed the Constitution was an outdated document that inhibited progress. Many progressives thought society was too complex for government to be restrained by a yellowing 18th-century relic. The president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, thought individual rights, the moral and political theory behind the Constitution, were “nonsense.” The dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound, said the Bill of Rights “were not needed in their own day, [and] they are not desired in our own.” What many progressives failed to understand, however, is that the Constitution’s restraints on government are by design. The Founders believed that individual liberty was paramount to all else—including efficiency.

As Taylor’s work began to become more well known, it was growing in popularity in progressive academic circles. Perhaps the most attractive feature of managerialism for progressives was its label (earned or not) of science. It gave them the power to achieve their subjective vision while claiming objectivity. But regardless, it caught the eye of one of Pound’s former star pupils, Louis Brandeis. Brandeis was a well-respected attorney, nicknamed the “people’s lawyer” for his relentless legal attacks on big business and government waste.

Brandeis was recognized for his creative legal strategies and is credited with pioneering the use of social science and other non-legal citations in legal briefs. But as with Taylor’s work, using the word “science” might be a stretch. Legal scholar David Bernstein describes one infamous brief as “nonsensical, even given the state of medical knowledge at the time… the brief reports that ‘there is more water’ in women’s than in men’s blood…”

Brandeis believed large institutions were inherently inefficient, and inefficiency was a cardinal sin for progressives of the time. Managerialism was appealing to Brandeis and other progressives because, as author Matthew Stewart explains, “the notion that science could be brought to the management of human affairs and so be placed in the service of social justice […] would supply a neutral standard with which to adjudicate and resolve social conflict.”

Progressives thought managerialism shouldn’t be limited to the factory floor, that it should be used for the betterment of society at large. But few people outside progressive intellectual circles knew of managerialism. Thanks to Brandeis, that was about to change.

IN 1909, AMERICAN RAILROADS petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to approve a freight rate increase. The ICC was formed in 1887 and charged with regulating the rails. Congress had just expanded the ICC’s authority to include approving any increase in the rails’ freight rates. The railroad owners argued that their costs were increasing, and so they needed to charge higher shipping rates. Merchants and shippers, not wanting to pay more, were opposed to the rate increase, so the ICC held a hearing to decide whether the railroads would be allowed to raise rates.

Brandeis had a reputation for going after large firms and industrial trusts, which made him the perfect attorney to attack the railroads.

Before and during the hearing, the “people’s lawyer” evangelized how the railroads suffered from the “curse of bigness.” Historian Thomas McCraw described the national railroads as “sprawling interstate business giants. Several employed more than 100,000 persons, and the industry as a whole was widely regarded as unduly wealthy and powerful. If there were a ‘curse of bigness,’ American railroads were among the most cursed institutions in the world.”

During the hearings, the railroads’ attorneys presented page after page of statistical analysis to prove their costs had indeed gone up. But Brandeis’ response took everyone by surprise. Rather than refute the rails’ arguments, he told the commission that if the railroads simply employed Taylor’s managerialism techniques, not only would they not need the rate increase, they would save a million dollars per day in operating costs.

Frederick Winslow Taylor

Brandeis then brought Taylor’s disciples Henry Gantt and Frank Gilbreth to testify to the merits of managerialism. McCraw described Brandeis as spinning out “day by day, a tale of miracles, of almost certain efficiencies that would accrue” from adapting managerialism. After Gilbreth performed a detailed demonstration of his scientifically optimized method of laying bricks, one commissioner remarked, “This has become a sort of substitute for religion with you.” Gilbreth agreed.

According to McCraw, American rails were among the most efficient organizations in the world at the time. But Brandeis’ “save a million dollars per day” claim made national news, and the railroads’ legal team struggled to refute it. How could you? By Brandeis’s logic, if you were unsuccessful in making a task more efficient, it was because you simply weren’t applying managerialism appropriately.

Unfortunately for the railroads, public sentiment at the time was hostile to them and the ICC ruled against the rate hike. Brandeis’ sound bite had taken on a life of its own during the hearings. McCraw said Brandeis’ argument was basically “made true by virtue of endless repetition.”

The ICC did not publicly reveal whether or not Brandeis’ arguments were what persuaded their rejection of the hike. Taylor biographer Robert Kanigel writes that “neither the decision nor the reasoning behind it, of course, mattered anymore: the hearings had already reached deep into American life.”

McCraw argued that, as it turns out, the railroads likely did need the rate increase. But it was too late. Brandeis, Taylor, and managerialism had achieved nationwide fame.

THE RAILROAD CASE introduced Taylor and managerialism to a national audience. But when Taylor published his book The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, he became a star. The book was an international hit, with translations in French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Latvian, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.

Managerialism was seen worldwide as an incredible advancement of human ingenuity that could improve almost every aspect of human life. Brian R. Fry’s textbook Mastering Public Administration describes its wide-ranging influence: “For a while, [managerialism] was regarded as the reform philosophy whose reach could extend well beyond the workplace and thus transform society at large. It was even regarded as the ultimate theory that would help control and regulate the vagaries of human life, including these ‘inexplicable’ things [essayist] Ralph Waldo Emerson listed: ‘Language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, and sex.’ In more recent times, several of Taylor’s management approaches have been applied to job design, selection, motivation and incentive systems, job performance criteria, performance appraisal, and organizational development.”

Taylor’s idea caught on far and wide and led to incredible advancements in American factories and businesses. Managerialism was very popular among Detroit auto manufacturers, federal arsenals and shipyards implemented it, and factory production lines implemented managerialism concepts to increase industrial production outputs.

But the successes managerialism produced for business and industry led many progressives to try to translate it into government policies to run (and manage) the country like a factory. Yet managerial concepts used to speed up a car assembly line simply aren’t translatable to society itself.

James Burnham, one of the National Review’s founding writers, was perhaps the first intellectual to use the term “managerialism”—and he was also one of the first intellectuals to warn of the dangers managerialism poses to a free society. Burnham predicted that government agencies would accumulate power over every aspect of the economy and shift power from individual private citizens to an all-powerful managerial class at the top. “Government is now the biggest business of all, in the strictly economic as well as in other spheres, the demonstrated ability of government to keep running at a loss is intolerable from the standpoint of capitalism, and shows that the government functioning in the economy is implicitly a non-capitalist institution.”

Political scientist James Scott points out managerialism’s authoritarian implications in his book Seeing Like a State. Under managerialism, policy and government are to be left to the select few, those with “the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order.” It requires centralizing government power to implement “sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.”

FREDERICK WINSLOW TAYLOR taught, lectured, and consulted until his early death from pneumonia one day after his 59th birthday in 1915. The popularity of managerialism made him a rich man and sparked a social movement around the world.

For better or worse, Taylor changed how the world viewed science, work, government, and life. But the managerialism worldview—that experts can show the one-best-way—can be as dangerous as it is powerful. As PLF’s chief operating officer, Chad Wilcox, put it: “In Aladdin’s hands, the lamp can be good or bad. But you definitely don’t want the lamp in the hands of Jafar.”

When organizing a factory production floor, finding efficiencies and perfecting logistics makes sense and can lead to incredible outcomes. But the Enlightenment values that America was founded on showed humanity that we should organize a government to protect people’s rights and freedoms—not enforce a king’s or emperor’s desires (even if those desires are efficiency). Even in a democracy, utilizing managerialism concepts to cede power to an unelected select few in order to find a one-best-way for society can only lead to tyranny. Managerialism in government violates this country’s founding principles of individualism and stands in complete contradiction to the Constitution, human nature, and plain common sense.

The Founders purposefully separated our government’s power into three, equally powerful, branches of government to prevent anyone—even experts—from ruling single-handedly. For the Founders, inefficiency in lawmaking was the whole point. They saw the ability to pass laws as dangerous and ripe for abuse. Fracturing the legislative process would require compromise and consensus, thus preventing any one person from imposing his will.

The Framers understood the temptation—and the danger— of centralizing power, even if it was well-intentioned or managed by experts.

Frederick Winslow Taylor and managerialism changed the world. But when progressives used Taylor’s managerialism concepts to reshape our government, they changed America for the worse.