Have Pity on the Poor Old Bureaucrats

The Waste Was Intentional

This would be the time to cash in on the “YAY wasteful bureaucrats were being fired” gravy train with my own personal “We’re so back” article.

I’m not taking that position—not exactly.

I am glad that government bureaucrats NGO-crats, and DEI-crats are getting fired, and excitedly look forward to our DOGE-ified future.

But as much as I am happy at the sight of all this firing, I want to briefly make the case for all the waste and grift Elon Musk and his team has found and stopped so far. Sort of.

For as much as we see waste, fraud, and abuse as Elon calls it within the federal government, or as some prefer money laundering, I can’t believe this happened accidentally.

Someone has to approve each grant, each payment, each office, and each new bureaucratic position. And they did each of these for a reason

You might say it was pure quid pro quo. Everyone enabled it for their friends in order to be allowed to do the same thing for themselves. And yes, that’s at least partially true.

But from a perspective of pure utility, for a high-up member of the Federal bureaucracy, wouldn’t just awarding more money to yourself and not spending billions of dollars on foreign “aid” real or otherwise be a simpler and more cynically logical proposition? Why overtax and anger the plebs if you’re a senator that could instead tax them less, give away less to others, and award more to yourself?

The “waste” uncovered in USAID (so far) and the rest of the government has to serve a purpose or there’d be far less of it.

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution going on in the background today offers a possible explanation. The alignment problem, or how “we get machines to behave in accordance with human norms and human values”¹ is a deep concern for many of the same demographics that make up our current political ruling class. While everyone from the Sam Altmans and Larry Ellisons to the Chuch Schumers and Alex Soros of the world pontificates about this publically with regard to AI, they also, less publically, do so implicitly with regard to the people.

People on average are easy to control with a mix of carrots and sticks, marketing, and authority. But the key point here is “on average.” While people will conform to a political order en masse if it’s stable and not completely screwing them over, not everyone will. Those of distinction of wealth, renown, skill, and ambition, in particular, are not easily kept happy.

A few dissidents are easy for every regime to pick off, but the risk to every regime is that too many become dissatisfied at once and offer the people an alternative to the current dispensation.

The alignment problem of natural intelligence (NI) is a difficult problem for every regime. You don’t just have to keep your own members and allies in line, you have to keep those who might offer a potential alternative subdued, drugged, or at least broadly “aligned” to your rule.

Ancient China had a large bureaucracy entered into upon merit that offered the promise of wealth, distinction, honor, and power if you could pass their equivalent of a standardized test. This bureaucracy, along with custom and tradition preserved stability, preserved order, and did so by high taxes and micromanaging influence over everything. Egypt, similarly, had its scribes. The Roman Empire ran off of its military, ensuring that anyone who wanted distinction and honor had to achieve it through the legions. And yes, they did much more than this alone, but, the Medieval World had its monks, its knights, and the Church preserving “alignment.” In every society, the goal is the same. Ensure that even those who are out of power within your society are, at least generally, aligned with the rulers’ norms and values. If anyone else seeks power, ensure they do so through your system.²

In America today we tend to abstract this problem away, fearing to talk about nationalism or religion too much out in the open. But the problem is still there. We’ve just had a particularly expensive solution to the alignment problem being used on us.

Anyone who wants to be “elite” in America has to play by the “rules” of economic liberalism, rising up through the regulatory bureaucracies of government or the financial sector writ large while getting Lockean and Millian liberalism along with a paradoxical mix of self-loathing leftism and messianic imperialism drilled into them.

The financial sector doesn’t just exert a large drain financially and regulatorily on the economy to enrich those who participate in it directly. It does so to prevent you from getting rich without being part of it and playing by its, and its government partners’ norms and values. The goal is to ensure that anyone who is a risk to the system has to depend on the system to survive.

The system is not just the bureaucrats who officially work for the government and live in fear of D.O.G.E. boys knocking on their door. It’s those who are enriched by government fiat and contract, working for a defense contractor as much as for an NGO, or who work in a “real job” but one which only exists due to government micromanaging and fiat.

The “waste” we see today is, for those within our regime, but the cost of solving the “alignment” problem of humans. Everyone with ability or wealth has to be bought off to keep them within the system, and yes, even it means creating a hundred thousand well-paid gender studies commissars or more generals than we’ve ever had in a real war, well, it’s just the cost of keeping them aligned with the direction of the rest of the regime. The system evolves layers of garbage wastefulness as a self-defensive measure against too much talent being aimless, and perhaps, interested in alternatives. Even the foreign waste serves the same purpose, keeping foreign regimes like those in Brussels, aligned to U.S. deep state values by making their elites align themselves with ours.

The alignment problem, as long as human nature remains fallen, remains a real problem even if we eliminate every tentacle of the current embedded deep state. Aligning human free will to a common cause can be achieved in ways other than a parasitical, expensive-to-maintain bureaucracy. The early Church operated off of the Holy Spirit and intense faith. The American Revolution produced (temporarily) unity, patriotism, and a common mission that aligned people together toward the common good and warded off parasites to said new nation. The early Bolsheviks operated off of a (diabolical) but effective passion for “equality” and managed to conquer a third of the world before they devolved into the same sort of elite commissar ruling class we have today. Nazism produced a very real (temporary) economic miracle because it managed to solve the alignment problem within itself by way of the idea that “everyone else is the enemy.”

In a period of transition between dispensations, as I hope today is, this makes unraveling the ruling bureaucracy not just necessary for budgetary savings.

As I wrote about a few weeks back, a few hundred thousand newly fired and formerly wealthy and unemployed gender studies specialists and race commissars would tend to suggest we’re in for some instability. Someone who has lost their wealth, livelihood, and prestige, tends to not be too happy about it:

Yes, we’ll have to watch out for their short-term revenge.

But, it does provide an opportunity. The system’s stability came from how many were bought into it and depended on it. Remove people from the system, and offer them an alternative way of collecting prestige, honor, and wealth, like conquering Canada:

or settling Mars:

The WHIMS of Mars

and you, perhaps, have the opportunity for a new, less parasitical system to emerge from the ashes.

The alignment problem, however, remains, and it’s our problem now.

I’m glad that we’re not paying for transgender surgeries for illegals and our soldiers. I’m glad that we’re not paying USAID to overthrow regimes around the world. I’m glad that bureaucrats everywhere live in fear of DOGE eliminating their jobs.

Let’s just remember that every society needs an identity, a mission, and unity. We have to find it somewhere, or we’re not a society, and everyone does live in Hobbes’ brutal world.

As a former professor of mine, stated, excitedly and whisperingly, when I talked to him a few months ago: “Space, Space, Space!”

1. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/features/can-we-truly-align-ai-human-values-qa-brian-christian

2. See the Republican Party before Donald Trump for example, whose goal was diverting dissident energy away from real change, and ensuring that nothing of value was accomplished.