Of course, that influence isn’t always benign:
It’s true, every halfway intelligent right winger I know irl had a massive conflict with at least one elementary teacher over things like: reading ahead, reading too difficult books, not showing enough work, etc etc. it’s the first time we experience the uncaring tyranny of state bureaucracy and it sucks.
In Reason, J.D. Tuccille discusses the hidden impact of “red tape” on the economy — just because the government isn’t getting a cheque doesn’t mean that compliance is free:
President Trump prepares to cut a “red tape” display of regulations representative of 1960 and compared to the current numbers of regulations, Thursday, December 14, 2017, in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, announcing how the administration is keeping its promise to remove regulations burdening job creators and American taxpayers.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Anybody who runs a business or engages in regulated activities knows that government red tape imposes a significant burden. Those burdens can be very high, deterring entrepreneurs from launching companies, restraining the growth of those that already exist, and driving some people to operate illegally rather than try to deal with an administrative state that specializes in obstructionism. But just how much do federal regulations cost us? A new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) tries to tally the price tag — and warns that Washington, D.C. needs major reform.
The Out-of-Control Regulatory State
That the regulatory state is out of control isn’t really a debatable point. The Federal Register lists 445 agencies with the legal authority to publish regulations. Forbes noted that “federal departments, agencies, and commissions issued 3,853 rules in 2016, while Congress passed and the president signed 214 bills into law”. In May of last year, the White House acknowledged that “the United States is drastically overregulated” and that “the Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages … Worse, many carry potential criminal penalties for violations.”
[…]
Compliance Costs Strangle the Economy
“Just as consumers shoulder much of the corporate income tax and tariff burden, regulatory compliance costs and mandates borne by businesses percolate through the economy and materialize as higher prices, lost jobs, and lower output,” writes Crews. “Off-budget regulatory costs can drag down the economy, just as overspending can.”
If you balk at the idea that federal regulations impose costs of over $2 trillion on Americans, you should be aware that CEI is restrained in its assessment. As the report points out, other sources assign even higher price tags to regulatory burdens. Three years ago, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) estimated that “the total cost of federal regulations in 2022 is an estimated $3.079 trillion (in 2023 dollars), an amount equal to 12% of U.S. GDP”. That NAM report added that “the annual cost burden for an average U.S. firm is $277,000, the equivalent of 19% of the average firm’s payroll expenses”. For manufacturers with fewer than 50 employees, the NAM put regulatory compliance costs at $50,100 per employee per year.
Compliance costs aren’t expressed in only monetary terms, they also require time and effort. According to the Office of Management and Budget, for Americans supplying required information to federal agencies “in FY2022, the total paperwork burden … was 10.34 billion hours, compared to 9.97 billion hours in FY2021”.
Of course, not everyone is equally impacted by government regulations. Generally speaking, the smaller the company, the harder it is to comply with all the relevant rules, so big companies often end up supporting demands for more regulation because it handicaps smaller competitors to a much greater degree.
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison explains the vast drawbacks of asking governments to solve problems:
Government bureaucracy is like a snow machine that keeps blasting, then hires more people to shovel the mess it just made.
We’re told it exists to help. To protect. To serve. Nice story. But in practice, it behaves more like a self-preserving organism. It doesn’t solve problems cleanly. It multiplies them, then offers to manage the mess it helped create.
Here’s the part most people miss. Bureaucracies don’t grow because problems get bigger. They grow because complexity gets rewarded. The more tangled the system, the more valuable the people who run it. That’s not a bug. That’s the incentive structure.
William Niskanen called this decades ago. Bureaucrats maximize budgets, not results. Bigger department, bigger influence. If a problem gets solved too efficiently, the machine loses a reason to exist. So problems don’t disappear. They get “managed”.
Then comes the language game.
Confusion gets dressed up as compassion.
A program no one understands becomes “comprehensive”.
A policy that creates dependency becomes “support”.
Failure becomes “underfunding”.It’s like hiring a mechanic who loosens parts just to bill you for tightening them later.
Now zoom in on Canada. Then zoom in tighter on Manitoba.
We don’t just have bureaucracy. We have an oversized public sector that’s crowding out the very engine that pays for it. In Manitoba especially, government employment makes up a huge slice of the workforce compared to the private sector that actually generates wealth. More administrators, fewer producers.
And here’s the quiet problem. Public sector growth doesn’t face the same discipline as the private sector. If a business bloats, it dies. If a department bloats, it asks for more funding.
So the balance drifts.
More people administering. Fewer people building, investing, risking.
More rules. Less output.
More spending. Slower growth.It creates a kind of economic inversion. The part of society that redistributes wealth starts to outweigh the part that creates it. That’s not sustainable. It’s like living off the interest of a bank account you’ve stopped contributing to.
Politicians don’t fix this because growth is easy to sell. Cuts are not. No one gets applause for saying, “We’re going to do less”. So the system expands in one direction only.
Forward. Always forward. Never back.
Meanwhile, taxpayers are handed the bill and told it’s the price of caring.
Here’s the hard reframe. Bureaucracy isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly what it’s rewarded to do. Expand. Protect itself. Justify its existence.
If you want a different outcome, you need different incentives.
Measure outcomes, not spending.
Reward efficiency, not headcount.
Shrink what doesn’t work, no matter how “important” it sounds.Because if you don’t trim the machine, it doesn’t stay the same size.
It learns to eat.
In The Freeman, Erik W. Matson pleads with the Virginian government not to “California our Commonwealth”, as the new governor keeps cribbing tax policies from Gavin Newsom’s playbook:
The state seal of Virginia. I am told that the motto Sic semper tyrannis does not actually stand for “Thus always to taxpayers”, all appearances to the contrary.
In 1966, fresh off four busy years of touring, the Beatles returned to the UK to discover they were on the brink of bankruptcy. Their earnings had placed them in the top tax bracket, putting them at the mercy of the Labour government’s 95% supertax. George Harrison, in response to this tyranny, penned the lyrics to what became the first track on their next album Revolver: “Taxman”.
Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
‘Cause I’m the taxmanHarrison’s words resonate across the pond today, especially for those living and working in the state of California. Consider the recent case of Sam Darnold, quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks. Darnold earned $178,000 for winning Super Bowl LX in February 2026, which was played in Santa Clara — and promptly found himself owing California $249,000, thanks to the state’s so-called “jock tax“. For almost three decades, the state has had the highest top marginal income tax rate in the US. Capital gains in California are treated — and taxed — as ordinary income, pushing many into higher tax brackets. At the state and local level, California features a garden variety of invasive taxes and surcharges to fund everything from tourism to mental health support initiatives. Add to this the recently proposed 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on the worldwide net worth of California residents worth more than $1 billion. The act would also amend the state constitution to remove the cap on taxes on intangible property (and likely cost the state $25 billion!).
California’s predatory tax regime, sadly, seems increasingly familiar to those of us living in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Thanks to the initiatives of the new governor Abigail Spanberger, Virginia is barreling down a trail of “California-ization.” In some sense, as Adam Johnston has recently discussed, our California-ization has been underway for over a decade, largely due to the influx of legal and illegal immigrants to the deep-blue suburbs in Northern Virginia. But it has entered a new and more aggressive phase under Spanberger, a former member of Congress’s Blue Dog Coalition who, two months in, is governing like anything but. Spanberger and her administration are openly attempting to gerrymander the Commonwealth’s congressional map in an effort to wipe out the state’s Republicans. They have also proposed an expansive set of truly California-esque taxes, subsidies, and regulations antithetical to liberty, prosperity, and “affordability.”
In January, City Journal‘s Judge Glock catalogued some of Spanberger’s initial ideas for governance, including her desire to subsidize housing for state employees and low-income residents and regulate the Commonwealth towards carbon neutrality. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of her ideas would, as Glock says, “drive up expenses for one group of consumers in order to benefit another group deemed more deserving”. If Spanberger’s officially announced agenda from November 2025 is any indication, the “more deserving” include smokers (taking a tactic straight from California’s playbook), solar farms, and scofflaw tenants (compare California’s 2019 Tenant Protection Act!).
Since the convening of the General Assembly, Virginia Democrats’ wildest dreams have metastasized into a concrete body of legislative proposals that promise at once to limit Virginians’ freedoms and nickel-and-dime us into oblivion. House Bill 978, for example, introduces new taxes on:
recreation, fitness, or sports facilities; nonmedical personal services or counseling; dry cleaning and laundry services; companion animal care; residential home repair or maintenance, landscaping, or cleaning services when paid for directly by a resident or homeowner; vehicle and engine repair; repairs or alterations to tangible personal property; storage of tangible personal property; delivery or shipping services; travel, event, and aesthetic planning services; and digital services.
Building on the architecture of the widely unpopular vehicle tax (which, despite what Spanberger proposed during her campaign, is likely here to stay), House Bill 557 proposes local personal property taxes on electric-powered lawn equipment — including mowers, trimmers, blowers, and chainsaws — used to maintain “commercial, public, or private gardens, lawns, trees, shrubs, or other plants”. These suggested taxes on electric-powered equipment complement a proposal in House Bill 881 encouraging the regulation and even outright banning of gas-powered leaf blowers — again following the lead of California.
The Roman Empire is a good example. It worked because they ran it like the Army.
A Roman legion is technically a “manipular phalanx”. A phalanx — that is, a tactical formation — that can detach parts of itself to pursue smaller tactical objectives. As far as I know, the Legion was an administrative unit, not a tactical one — the largest tactical formation was the cohort — but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, the Romans were accustomed to independently-operating tactical units. So long as they maintained formation, the sub-commanders had very broad latitude to do whatever they needed to do. They were expected to be able to command what we’d call “combined arms” (a vexillation). Ancient Auftragstaktik.
They ran their Empire the same way. So long as the sub-commanders (the Governors) “held formation”, they could pursue the agreed-upon tactical objectives (peace, revenue maximization) as they saw fit. They could put together what amounted to an administrative vexillation, using whoever was available at the time. The Emperor basically dealt with personnel problems, like a general — he had his broad policy objectives, but most of the stuff he ruled on boiled down to personnel matters; he’d direct his sub-commanders to fix a problem in whatever way seemed best to them.
We run our polities like bureaucracies — businesses, not armies. The Army’s basic problem is how to keep itself occupied in peacetime — it assumes that it exists, and always will exist, because it’s necessary; should the Army cease to exist, so will the State. Business’s basic problem is to generate enough output to keep itself in existence — a very different proposition, requiring a very different mindset.
A State bureaucracy is the worst of both worlds — it assumes it always will exist, like the Army, so it needs to find a way to keep itself occupied during “peacetime”; but that means it needs to produce enough output to justify itself in “peacetime”, because it’s never not peacetime — the business mentality.
Severian, commenting on “Means and Ends”, Founding Questions, 2025-09-04.
J.D. Tuccille notes that corruption — at least corruption being brought to our attention — is rising at the same rate as bureaucratic red tape. It’s almost as though there’s a correlation between making things harder to do and officials accepting “sweeteners” to make things easier to do …
At the moment, corruption investigations and trials of political figures are taking place in jurisdictions around the U.S. including Hawaii, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C. These aren’t isolated scandals; the latest edition of an international corruption index finds corruption worsening globally, with the United States earning its worst score to date. Given that corruption involves government officials peddling favors for compensation, it shouldn’t be surprising that evidence suggests the solution lies in reducing the power and role of the state.
[…]
Regulation Breeds Corruption
“EU regulation is not only becoming more cumbersome but it is also pilling in”, Oscar Guinea and Oscar du Roy of the European Centre for Political Economy wrote in 2024. “The amount of new regulation accumulated during the last years has been staggering.”
That matters. In its advice for reducing corruption, Transparency International emphasizes, “there is a broad consensus that unnecessary and excessive administrative requirements for complying with regulations create both incentives and opportunities for bribery and corruption”.
The means by which this occurs is logical enough. Government-imposed permitting and licensing requirements, administrative procedures, prolonged decision-making, and contract awards create a temptation to shorten delays and reduce costs by padding officials’ pockets. In many cases, selling exceptions becomes the real reason for red tape. That phenomenon applies to the entire world, including the United States.
In the U.S., the More Regulations, the More Bribery
In a paper published in the European Journal of Political Economy in 2020, Oguzhan Dincer of the Department of Economics at Illinois State University and Burak Gunalp of the Department of Economics at Turkey’s Cankaya University looked at the relative effects of federal regulations on the corruption levels in U.S. states.
“Power to enforce the regulations gives government officials power to extort bribes”, they wrote. “Government officials have an opportunity to extort bribes from the firms trying to enter an industry because they have the power to issue the industry licenses. They also have an opportunity to extort bribes from the incumbent firms by simply colluding with them and keeping the regulations unchanged and/or strengthening the regulations to increase the costs of entry for new firms. Finally, regulations and the discretionary power given to government officials to extract bribes create incentives for firms to operate in the unofficial economy.”
Specific to the U.S., they examined two decades of data to see how red tape affected the honesty of public officials.
What they found shouldn’t be surprising: “Using the U.S. Justice Department’s data on the number of federal convictions for the crimes related to corruption, and controlling for several economic and demographic variables, we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between federal regulations and corruption.”
We had a look at how well the British government looks after asylum-seekers yesterday, but other nations are probably doing similarly inequitable things to give money and services to non-citizens than they ever would for the people who pay the taxes for these over-generous programs. In the National Post, Tristin Hopper outlines the findings of a recent analysis from the Parliamentary Budget Office on the costs of supporting huge numbers of foreign nationals in Canada:
An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.
Paying the health-care premiums of refugee claimants will cost Canadians a record $1 billion this year, with some of the beneficiaries continuing to receive free health care despite their claims having already been rejected.
That’s according to a new analysis by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and it’s just one of several ballooning costs wrought by the unprecedented number of foreign nationals currently living in Canada by virtue of a claim of refugee status.
The Interim Federal Health Program, which offers premium health benefits to asylum claimants, is soon set to hit $1 billion in annual costs for the first time, according to an analysis last Thursday by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
This is a five-fold increase from just six years ago, when the program was costing $211 million per year. The analysis also projects that costs are expected to surge for the foreseeable future, with the annual budget likely to hit $1.5 billion as early as 2029.
All told, between now and 2030, Canadians are on track to spend $6.2 billion on health care for refugees or refugee claimants.
“The rising volume of asylum claims, along with the longer duration of eligibility caused by extended determination times, has been an important growth driver in recent years,” reads the PBO report.
The report was commissioned following a Conservative-led request made at the House of Commons standing committee on health. In a Thursday statement, the Conservative party noted that the Interim Federal Health Program can be accessed even by asylum claimants who have had their case rejected.
It also offers a higher level of care than that enjoyed by the average Canadian citizen. In addition to hospital care and surgical care, the IFHP also covers dental care, vision care, pharmacare and other services not typically covered by public health plans.
“Rejected asylum claimants are now receiving better health care than many Canadians who have paid into a system their entire life,” read a joint statement by Dan Mazier and Michelle Rempel Garner, the shadow ministers of health and immigration, respectively.
It added, “at a time when six million Canadians cannot find a family doctor and are waiting for care, it’s unacceptable that bogus asylum seekers are receiving better health benefits than Canadians”.
Governments everywhere are always on the lookout for more ways to raise revenue, so any suggestion of an untapped resource they can tax will get their attention. Apparently the current hot idea is an unrealized gains tax, which @wokeandwoofing satirized thusly:
Also on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @Yogi frames the proposed new tax for Gen Z readers:
Unrealized gains tax for Gen-Z:
You buy a Pokémon card for $50.
Someone offers you $500 for it. You say no. You love that card. You’re keeping it.
The government says: “Cool, but that card is worth $500 now. You owe us $100 in taxes.”
You: “… I didn’t sell it.”Government: “Don’t care. Pay up.”
You don’t have $100 lying around. So you’re forced to sell the card you love just to pay a tax on money you never received.
Next month? That card drops back to $50.
Your card is gone. Your money is gone. And the government shrugs.
That’s a wealth tax on unrealized gains. They don’t pay you back the tax …
Now picture this.
Your mom calls you crying. She has to sell the house she raised you in. Not because she can’t afford it. She’s lived there 30 years. It’s paid off.
But some website says it’s worth more now and the government says she owes $15,000 she doesn’t have.
So she sells your childhood home. The kitchen where she made you breakfast. The doorframe where she marked your height every birthday.
Gone.
To pay a tax on money that was never real.
Now picture the opposite.
Your dad put everything into his small business. For 20 years he built it from nothing. One year the business is “valued” at $2 million on paper. He owes a massive tax bill. He empties his savings. Sells his truck. Borrows money. Pays it.
Next year the market crashes. His business is worth $200,000.
He lost everything to pay a tax on a number that doesn’t exist anymore.
Does the government give him his money back?
No.Does the government give him his truck back?
No.Does the government care?
No.They sold this idea as “taxing billionaires”. But billionaires have armies of lawyers, offshore accounts, and trusts. They’ll be fine.
You know who won’t be fine? Your mom. Your dad. Your neighbor with a small business. The farmer down the road who’s had the same land for four generations and now has to sell it because dirt got expensive.
You’re not taxing wealth. You’re taxing people for owning things.
It’s like getting a parking ticket for a car you might drive somewhere someday.
They want you to own nothing and be happy. To fund the fraud, waste and abuse of the welfare state they created.
There is enough money. More tax isn’t needed. It’s all a lie. But you’ve been gaslit into believing this is a rich vs poor debate.
I hope you understand what’s at stake.
The page continues: “You’ll get extra money to buy healthy food if you’re pregnant or a mother of a child aged three or under”. The payment is £5.25 per week for pregnancy, £9.50 for a baby under one, £5.25 for children aged one to three, plus a one-off £300 maternity grant for anyone expecting a child or with a baby under six months. Even when asylum is refused, support continues: “You’ll be given somewhere to live and £49.18 per person on a payment card for food, clothing and toiletries”. Only those who decline the accommodation lose the card.
Medical care is covered in full. “You may get free National Health Service healthcare,” the Government states, including “free prescriptions for medicine, free dental care, free eyesight tests and help paying for glasses”. Children are guaranteed a place in a state school and “may be able to get free school meals”. The terms are so generous that the NHS issues a dedicated HC2 certificate for people on asylum support, giving them automatic exemption from all prescription and dental charges, free eye tests and optical vouchers, and even help with wigs and fabric supports.
Compare this to the treatment of the people who pay for it. A British worker who loses his job must apply for Universal Credit, then wait at least five weeks before receiving a payment. Any advance must be repaid out of later instalments. He must show that he is seeking work, accept appointments and interviews, and risk sanctions if he misses them. He is scrutinised as a potential cheat. An asylum claimant is treated as a recipient of moral debt, requiring no proof of worthiness.
When the native taxpayer falls ill, he must pay £9.90 per prescription unless he qualifies for a limited exemption. He may buy a “pre-payment certificate” to spread the cost, but the charge remains. Dental treatment on the NHS costs £27.40 for a check-up, £75.30 for a filling, £326.70 for a crown or denture, and many cannot find an NHS dentist at all. Asylum seekers, by contrast, present their HC2 certificate and pay nothing. If the citizen asks the council for housing, he is told that the waiting list is full, that he is not a “priority case”, and that the private rental market is his problem. The asylum applicant, by the State’s own words, is “given somewhere to live if you need it”.
None of this is accidental. The cost of asylum support in 2023–24 was about £4.7 billion, according to the Home Office’s own figures, of which £3 billion went on hotel accommodation. In 2024–25, the bill fell slightly to £4 billion, but £2.1 billion of this was still for hotels — an average of £5.7 million every day. The National Audit Office has found that the ten-year accommodation contracts, first priced at £4.5 billion, are now projected to cost £15.3 billion. Between April and October 2024 alone, £1.7 billion was spent on housing and managing asylum seekers. The Financial Times has estimated the total annual cost of the asylum system at roughly £4.8 billion. The number of people receiving asylum support — housing, cash or both — now stands at over 100,000.
The figures expose a transfer of resources on a colossal scale. What is presented as “humanitarian duty” has become a domestic welfare state for foreigners, sustained by British workers who receive less support in return for greater taxation. The British State can house every migrant but not every nurse, find free dental care for the undocumented but not for the elderly, provide optical help for those who have just arrived but not for those who have paid into the system all their lives.
Marian Halcombe, “Britain’s Welfare Empire: A State that Feeds Strangers and Starves Its Own”, The Libertarian Alliance, 2025-11-05.
Canada isn’t the only place with rigidly governed agricultural cartels … the European Union has always been a big fan of governing agricultural markets by fiat rather than allowing the markets to sort out how much of which product should be produced. One of the biggest markets actively distorted by EU regulation is the wine industry, where faulty regulations ended up paying for a vast over-supply of wine in the 1980s and 90s. Rather than eliminating the regulatory structures, the EU continues to prefer letting bureaucrats dictate to producers:
When the Common Agricultural Policy was established, it was quickly determined that one of its core objectives would be the protection of farmers, ensuring stable incomes and food security. In the wine sector, this logic translated into strong interventionism aimed at expanding and stabilizing production.
For decades, Brussels subsidized vineyard planting, protected minimum prices, and absorbed producers’ economic risk, disconnecting production decisions from signals of demand. Producing more ceased to be an economic choice and became a politically safe decision.
This approach created a structural market distortion. As wine consumption began to decline across Europe for demographic, cultural, and economic reasons, the artificially incentivized productive structure remained intact and unable to adjust.
It was in this context that, during the 1980s and 1990s, the first major shock occurred, known as the wine lake: massive wine surpluses with no outlet. Even then, Brussels treated this episode as an isolated and temporary phenomenon, ignoring the fact that it was the direct consequence of existing policies. By persisting with the same strategies, the problem ceased to be episodic and became structural.
In the early 2000s, the European Union was finally forced to recognize that the wine crisis was not temporary. However, instead of removing production incentives and restoring the market’s adjustment function, it opted for a new form of intervention: subsidizing the voluntary uprooting of vineyards. The decision to destroy productive capacity ceased to be economic and became administrative, decreed from the European political center, with profound effects across several countries.
This model, presented as temporary, set a dangerous precedent. Rather than allowing less viable producers to exit the market through prices and economic choice, the state began paying for withdrawal, subsidizing the costs of adjustment and normalizing the idea that the correction of public policy errors should be financed with more public money.
This policy did not solve the underlying problem. It merely reduced cultivated area temporarily, while leaving intact the regulatory architecture which had created the initial distortion. The sector became trapped in a cycle of incentivized expansion, predictable crisis, and administrative correction.
It is within this framework that the Wine Package emerges as the European Union’s latest set of measures for the wine sector. The package relies on an administratively planned reduction of supply through financial incentives for vineyard uprooting, complemented by regulatory adjustments, temporary support measures, and crisis management instruments. Instead of allowing the market to adjust to declining consumption, Brussels once again opts for the destruction of productive capacity as a policy tool. Although the package includes support measures and environmental framing, its central axis remains the administrative reduction of supply.
The impact of these decisions is not marginal. The European wine sector represents a significant share of the European Union’s economy, sustaining approximately 2.9 million direct and indirect jobs and contributing more than €130 billion to EU GDP.
FEMA, in fact, is an illegal organization. It’s mentioned nowhere in the Constitution (which lists the lawful powers of the government in Article I, Section 8), nor did anybody ever vote about it, neither you nor I, nor even the Congress. It was created out of thin air by Presidential fiat, and given unprecedented power to override, at gunpoint, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law in general.
Since the San Francisco earthquake, I have been paying attention. In all that time, I have never heard anybody, civilian or local official, who had anything to say about FEMA that didn’t make it seem like a combination of the Nazi Gestapo and the Black Death. Apparently there is no situation so tragic and overwhelming that they can’t make it even worse. FEMA has an unanswerable power of life and death over entire communities and there is nothing to protect those communities — or anything else that is uniquely American — from its foul dictatorial grasp.
L. Neil Smith, “Good Mornin’ America, How Are Ya?”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-09-04.
Copernican draws some examples of life in a corrupt authoritarian society (the old Soviet Union) and compares them with similar situations in the western world today. Depressingly, we have been converging on how Soviets used to have to work the system just to get access to the people they had to get permission slips and permits from:
Corruption is one of the largest issues of our time. Particularly in places like Minnesota, but also nationally. For that reason, it’s necessary to understand corruption, what it is, and how to utilize its benefits. The United States exists in a political hybridization of Soviet Managerialism and Libertarian Corporatism. In both cases, corruption is a common feature of our society, but we don’t see it on the ground the same way that Mexican business owners do or Russian gangs.
Thus, I pose the following question: Are our societies so different that we cannot also benefit from corruption while our culture is ground to dust beneath it?
I recently saw a video from this YouTube channel that discusses Russia and the psychology of living in an oppressive state. A nation not of law, but of management, public policies, and mercurial Karens at every level. I’m not sure how it feels to be Western European (I get the impression the progenitor of the videos is now living in Western Europe), but I can say that, being an American, life seems similar to what’s described therein: Hope seems dangerous. Liberty seems like a time bomb until you step on the wrong bureaucrat’s toes, and your entire future and that of your family is held hostage by the proclivities of unaccountable bureaucrats that you’ve never spoken to1.
Meanwhile, at the top of government, billions of dollars are being laundered by corrupt politicians like Tim Walz, who will lie to your face. Import demographics that hate you. And if you dare defend yourselves, a lynch mob may well try to kill you. How do I get my hands on that money spigot that seems to be free-access for people who want to kill me?
Corruption, or lack thereof, is another one of those American Myths that needs to be deconstructed in the psyche of the population. To do that, we need to understand what corruption really is. Not at the national level of billions of laundered dollars for foreign pirates, but at the personal level. What is corruption for us stuck in the limbo of a faltering civilization?
When I was young, I witnessed corruption for the first time. I was a child, and I was just entering the primary school system in my home country of Russia. Like all things, there was government paperwork to fill out and submit. When we arrived at the office, an old woman sat behind a glass barrier to help people with their paperwork. My mother knocked on the glass to get her attention. The clerk ignored my mother. My mother knocked again and then took a chocolate bar out of her bag. She passed it through a window into the barrier to the clerk. The clerk looked up and took the chocolate bar, hiding it in a stack of forms. Then she asked, “How can I help?” and filed the papers so that I could attend school.
Corruption doesn’t have to solely give an advantage to those politicians and billionaires sitting atop the society. Corruption can act at every level, from top to bottom. The West exists in a system that is corrupt from the top down, while the Russians exist in a system that is corrupt from the bottom up. Corruption doesn’t need to take the form of extortion payments or threats of ending careers. Corruption can be small, personal, and in many ways more honest than managerial formalization.
Maybe a manager will find some problem with your paperwork, any paperwork you hand in. So to smooth over the process, you bring her a coffee or a chocolate bar. Maybe your academic advisor will help you make the right connections if you gift him a bottle of whiskey or schnapps for Christmas. Maybe you want a teacher to treat your child better at school, so you give her a cupcake or school supplies as a gift.
You don’t need police officers on the take to be advantaged by corruption.
Most people here on substack are underemployed. I am one of them for the time being. I can state with certainty that I have never gotten a job by applying for a job. Never once have I sent out a resume and heard back anything besides an automated “dear applicant, kindly go fuck yourself” from the HR manager. Maybe it’s a byproduct of being a White guy. Lord knows I have enough degrees to find work.
Rather, the only way I’ve ever found employment is through direct connection: I have a friend who has a friend who knows someone who needs an employee. I’m close to fitting the bill, so they’ll hire me. Sometimes they have to dip and duck around hiring-managers and HR to do it:
Here’s where we’re going to post the job. We’re legally required to leave the posting up for two weeks, but apply with these five keywords in your Resume. When I review the resumes submitted, I’ll be able to pick out yours.
It seems quite conspiratorial when you say it out loud, though that’s the way it has to be in more than a few companies. If they want to hire a White guy, there are hoops to jump through. The addition of “hiring policies” and “diversity” quotas has just added a few hoops, but did not limited one’s acrobatic ability.
Corruption is an individual or a small group of individuals acting in their own interests by ignoring or subverting legal or social rules of conduct.
If you have a friend you’d rather hire than some Indian with a slightly nicer resume? That’s corruption. When the boss hires his nephew, that’s corruption. When you give the DMV associate a chocolate bar, and she helps you with your paperwork instead of telling you to go fuck yourself, that’s corruption. When you hand the inspector of your 40-year-old truck a fifty so that he marks “passed” on your emissions inspection, that’s corruption.
- “I am Russian. Here’s how corruption really works.” I highly recommend a look. – https://youtu.be/v21toLzcCgg
A brilliant example of the general case of progressives never taking into account the impact of their own pet schemes is the Canadian Armed Forces including “armed civil resistance” as part of their contingency planning for an American invasion … at the same time that the Canadian government is moving heaven and earth to disarm as many Canadians as possible:
Jason James writes:
Canadian military planners have modeled a potential US invasion from the south.
Their plan?
An armed civilian resistance.
I’m not sure if they’ve checked in with the Liberal government yet, but they’ve outlawed most “assault style” weapons (meaning anything that could actually be used to mount such a resistance).
And depending on where the US invades, they might have a difficult time finding civilians who actually own anything beyond kitchen knives.
Furthermore, anyone who does own hunting rifles or the few legal “assault style” weapons would be more inclined to fight on the side of the Americans than defend a socialist wasteland that sold their future to China.
So what’s the plan then? Mobilize the Mexican cartels and Chinese organized crime gangs who actually have some fire power? Form a militia of IRGC operatives and Indian drug gangs to fight American special forces?
I highly doubt any of them would be interested in walking into certain death for a country they have no allegiance to.
So I guess we’re down to a handful of lesbians and communists armed with broom handles defending Vancouver and Toronto from the greatest military power the world has ever known.
Good luck with that, comrades.
No disrespect to James, but the weapons the federal government are trying to confiscate are not “weapons of war” or “assault weapons” — they are mostly semi-automatic guns that look vaguely like military weapons. The feds offered to send all confiscated weapons to Ukraine as they fight a desperate war of defence against the Russian invaders and need anything they can get. And Ukraine refused the offer because these weapons would not be useful in combat. But the basis for confiscating them in the first place is that they’re all dangerous military weapons.
This is likely what would happen if such an invasion materialized:
Of course, you can always depend on Not the Bee to provide a tasteful selection of topical memes.
Another Scott, Scott Alexander, has a long essay about the career and life of the late comic strip artist, author, and internet personality. When I first encountered his Dilbert comic strip, I was living the cubicle life and far too many of the jokes and situations felt like Adams must be in the same company — possibly even the same department. I read a couple of his non-Dilbert books, but I didn’t follow his work very much after I escaped the cube farm, so reading this essay told me a number of things about Adams that I didn’t already know:
Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive.1
Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re all inmates in prisons with different names.
But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here.
Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb.
This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.
The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad’s perfectly-white teeth.
Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting.
If your reaction is “I would absolutely buy that book”, then keep reading, but expect some detours.
- As is quantum complexity blogger Scott Aaronson.
At Ace of Spades H.Q., Buck Throckmorton remembers Scott Adams:
Scott Adams’ death is being eloquently covered by others, so there is not much I can add. But I do want to offer up a few quick thoughts. Aside from Dilbert being my favorite cartoon for decades, I was a loyal reader of Mr. Adams’ blog for many years before his greater celebrity during the Trump era. Mr. Adams often expanded my views, and occasionally frustrated me, but he helped me understand how rational people can understand things differently.
Back in 2016, when I doubted that Donald Trump was in any way conservative, and when I thought Trump had no chance to beat Hillary in the presidential election, Scott Adams was one of two writers who made an impact on my attitude toward that election. Mr. Adams famously wrote about the reasons why Trump was likely to win. He was right. (The other writer was John Hinderaker of Powerline, who was the first legacy conservative I read who stated that of course we traditional Republicans needed to vote for Trump.)
I was flattered once when Scott put out a call for Dilbert topics and he ended up using one of my submissions. As I recall, his invitation to the public was something to the effect of “You provide the workplace situation and I’ll provide the humor“. I wrote him and offered up what a special hell it was to be working for a company campaigning for recognition in a local “Best Places to Work” contest. Shortly thereafter he used that in a cartoon.
Finally, my favorite Dilbert character was one who got very little screen time. Scott Adams may be gone, but Mordac, The Preventer of Information Services lives on.
I think of Mordac every time I have a spontaneously obsolete password, or I’m blocked from being able to access a system necessary for my job, or I can’t access an SaaS app because there are too few licenses, or I’m logged out of a system because I got called away for a short meeting, etc. In all these circumstances, I give a tip of the hat to Mordac, and I applaud his success in protecting my employer by preventing me from doing my job.
As I’ve mentioned before, it sometimes seems that Australia, Britain, and Canada are in a three-way race to de-democratize themselves as fast as they possibly can. Here’s the free-to-cheapskates portion of Ed West‘s essay on the return of liberal authoritarianism:
“Palace of Westminster” by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
It’s around this time of year that various NGOs give their assessment on the state of democracy and freedom of the world. The Fraser Institute’s Human Freedom Index was published earlier in December and Freedom House’s next report will arrive in February. It was at the start of last year that Romania was downgraded to a “hybrid democracy” by another body, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), while France is now merely a flawed democracy. Sacré bleu!
What about our own beloved island, the mother of Parliaments? It will be interesting to see where Britain features in this year’s reports, and whether recent developments will impact on our rating.
Just recently, for instance, the British government postponed four mayoral elections until 2028, elections they are certain to lose. The Electoral Commission warned that it risked undermining “the legitimacy of local decision making and damaging public confidence”, while the chairwoman of the Labour Party even refused to rule out delaying the next General Election, leading Nigel Farage to accuse her of having “total contempt for democracy”.
Keir Starmer has also taken effective control of the House of Lords and will almost entirely eliminate opposition among peers by 2027, which he is able to do to the second chamber thanks to Tony Blair’s constitutional reforms. While the government extends the franchise to children, and even plans to place voting booths in schools, a clear violation of rules about politicising the education system, they’re also keen to restrict who can stand in elections.
As the i reported, Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, “is seeking to make the Electoral Commission recommend enhanced DBS checks for candidates and then publish whether or not parties have agreed to the vetting. The aim is to ensure political parties justify whether their candidates are fit for office and name and shame those who refuse to participate.”
This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but “non-crime hate incidents“, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political charges are far more likely to be directed at those with Right-wing opinions.
When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of “democratic backsliding” usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal “strongmen” we read about, just not a very effective one.
There are a number of accepted symptoms of democratic backsliding, among the most commonly listed being rejection of democratic rules, a disregard for constitutional norms, attempts to use legal mechanism to sidestep democracy, which is described as “stealth authoritarianism”, denial of opponents’ legitimacy, and the tendency to characterise them as outsiders or a threat to national security; on top of this, one might consider a willingness to curtail civil liberties, restricting the power of the media, and violating freedom of speech and association. Finally, and worst of all, is the toleration or encouragement of violence against opponents.
Credit: the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago
By these broad definitions, Britain arguably meets many of these criteria (but not, most importantly, the last). There is certainly censorship, which has increased with the Online Safety Act, designed to combat “hate” as well as “misinformation”. Misinformation, of course, is everywhere, but its existence certainly provides a convenient excuse for governments to clamp down on the sort of information they dislike. The Government has also pondered banning Twitter, and while I feel that the widespread disgust at the Grok “deepfake” feature is reasonable, such a ban would completely cripple opposition, returning control of the discourse to the old media.
As for the British state’s definition of “hate”, there is a widespread belief that people motivated by hostility to mass immigration are extreme and dangerous, so the full force of the law must be used to stop them gaining support among a public who are totally guileless when it comes to absorbing information. This belief has grown more entrenched with the rise of populism, and makes western European governments increasingly sceptical of democracy itself.
It’s obvious that many people are concerned about the prospect of Nigel Farage becoming prime minister, and as the election date comes closer, and if he’s still in a position to win, the tone will become more shrill. Starmer admitted to this terror when he said, tellingly, that “If there is a Conservative government I can sleep at night. If there was a right-wing government in the United Kingdom, that would be a different proposition.”
Update, 17 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
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