It pains me to talk about policies. Most of my political stripe consider themselves truly “woke,” not in the regressive sense of buying whatever regime talking point is being promoted, but in the sense of being “red-pilled” and understanding that all of our centrally planned agencies and organizations are inherently flawed.
This leads to a very interesting dynamic. No matter which policy is being voted on, the two primary groups of the right and left tend to just take opposing sides the majority of the time. One side will accuse you of wishing death on vulnerable people if you don’t vote for a policy, and the other will accuse them of evil and corruption. Most of the time, I have the unfortunate position of understanding that both of them are correct in their aspersions to the majority’s policy, and incorrect when in the majority. Often for the wrong reasons, they are right in opposing the other’s growth and expansion of authority.
Nothing is more depressing than when both of the major parties agree on a policy. It is one of the most certain signs that the policy is bad.
So are these elitists, politicians, and unelected bureaucrats just ignorant fools who don’t understand that their political goals harm people, or are they nefarious actors intent on hurting people, taking from the masses to aid themselves and their close counterparts?
In my years of experience working with government, I think it is both.
The systems and bureaucracies actually promote people to positions based on their ability to enable others. Very few make it to positions of influence or leadership in government who have not first served years or even decades as enablers, doing what they were told, and nodding their heads frequently in response to commands or directives that ranged from malignant to outright immoral.
Resistance is not tolerated. Fighting the system identifies these people as low-hanging fruit, and they are removed. In the military this was done by denying key positions to people, essentially blocking promotion, and forcing them out based on retention standards. Similar things can be done on the civilian side by denying credit for hard work or project positions to the squeaky wheel in order to squeeze them out. It is important to note that it isn’t done intentionally to squash original thought or dissent. People naturally isolate themselves from those who are contentious or abrasive, and the key positions are often in frequent contact with those who choose who fills them. They avoid the conflict because they themselves are enablers who are trying to create an easier environment to work in.
It is understandable.
After enough time has passed, the vast majority who rise to positions of authority in government organizations have been screened, vetted, and heavily curated through a system that promotes groupthink at the very great cost of ignoring what is correct or true. A general intent of completing a mission or meeting a requirement, after being filtered through the bureaucratic nightmare and influenced by politics, can lead to decisions or policies completely at odds with reality.
Military commands can rationalize elective procedures for trans service members at the highest levels if it means currying favor with a handful of politicians in key positions to approve budgets or if it allows them to gain access to leftist college campuses in order to try and recruit new members. They can hide behind excuses that other service members receive surgeries, though those surgeries might be repairs from injuries due to service, and treat them as similar, and it allows them to ignore the great cost in terms of individual and unit readiness. Mission can actually fail as a result of the policies they promote, but they fudge numbers, move the problems around, and generally allow the system to continue in spite of great concerns related to their policies.
Enabling this is that failing to meet mission actually serves the purpose of allowing higher ups in command to blame budget shortfalls or politics. When missions are not being met, or requirements ignored, government organizations just request more money. So there is even a gross incentive to fail. Not miserably, of course, but if you are successful, bureaucracy is likely to starve you and reallocate your resources to other places where parallel organizations are failing. Success and efficiency gets starved while failure and inefficiency is rewarded.
Surviving in these organizations breeds laziness. It is a form of indoctrination by osmosis, where existing in the environments most heavily influenced by those bureaucracies tends to blunt all sharp edges. The spirit of adventure and risk is eroded, if not overtly punished, and agreement and support for leadership is rewarded. The comfort and security these positions offer for essentially doing as little as possible allows all of what makes bureaucracy bad and inefficient to flourish.
Now, government is not unique in this, but it does act as the standard bearer. Large corporations and big business can certainly offer similar environments, but at the end of the day, they are farther away from the financial spigot government has. Business is still harnessed by profit margins and can only tolerate a certain degree of inefficiency before corrections have to be made. Government is never remotely reigned in by this same incentive.
So over time, those rising to the top in government bureaucracy are increasingly incompetent. There are exceptions, but they are few.
What is problematic, though, is that of those who are not incompetent or ignorant, likely are influenced by increasing power in the adage that power corrupts. So of those who retain any sense of competence, it is terribly tempting to take advantage of the inefficiency surrounding them for their own gain. It breeds corruption among what might otherwise be good people.
The exceptions do exist, but the exceptions prove the rule. At each level of leadership higher, you are more likely to find yes men and corruption. The higher you look, the worse the problem gets.
People may be tempted to believe that politicians are exempt from this, especially if they are new to politics, but the self-selection criteria for those seeking political office actually makes them more likely to be corrupt. The very concept of someone thinking they are good enough to essentially tell others how to live or what to do might as well list “narcissist” or “sociopath” in their curriculum vitae.
Depressingly, those bureaucracies are then ripe to be misled by the most corrupt, or people with influence, who have nefarious intents. The entire structure is designed to take orders and execute, providing massive organizational power to just a few influential people who are more likely to be inherently bad people by the way they are selected or how they are promoted through the system.
So the answer to whether the government or people in power are evil or incompetent is a mix of both. Bad policies persist and bad people are empowered both because bad people are present and enacting policies for selfish reasons, but also because the nature of the organizations is to squash dissent and disagreement.
It is terrible when you think about it, yet the one silver lining is that it will eventually fail. These systems always fail and it is the prerogative of all liberty minded folks to be ready and able to provide solutions and replacements where warranted once those systems fail. It is a calculation problem. The central control and subsidies create inefficiencies which are unsustainable. So the markets and liberty will win in the end, the only question is how painful will the American empire make it for the rest of us during her death throes?
