The Idiot Cousin Theory of Government
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The first and foremost purpose of government is
to create government jobs. Going back to the early
days of American history a time honored tradition of
newly elected politicians was to obtain positions
for their friends, their nephews and assorted
cousins. In those more innocent times appointing
someone an inspector of something was a cordial way
of repaying a favor. But the problem with inspectors
is that they inspect things.
There are only so many idiot cousins you can hire
to stamp papers and frown at things until you have
to create an entire new department and then a
division and then an agency to give them something
to do. And that leads to budget drains and an
expansion of government authority that interferes
with the lives of people who work for a living.
A few centuries later we live in a country where
every place that has more than three people living
within three miles of each other is overseen by a
multitude of agencies with overlapping levels of
authority beginning from the locals to the staties
and all the way up to Washington D.C. where the
swamps were paved over to construct massive
buildings full of agencies all descended from the
day someone's idiot cousin got a sinecure, a
government horse and an inkwell in a city that no
one used to take seriously.
Many of us would gladly trade off those buildings
and those bureaucrats in return for a few dozen
idiot cousins drinking in Washington taverns on the
public's dime in a country with no income tax and no
one pounding on your door every five minutes because
you don't feed your kids arugula, don't recycle your
trash and don't care about the latest trendy cause
already being written into the state religion.
Unfortunately like rabbits, idiot cousins lead to
more idiot cousins. Corruption doesn't stop at a set
line, it pushes as far as it can, and when a man
with some big ideas gets hold of it, then bar the
door because it's DOE/EPA/HUD/DOL time.
The idiot cousins are satisfied to think small.
Their ambitions reach as high as a government salary
for doing nothing and a few taverns and ladies of
the evening to spend it on. A hundred thousand of
them can be a problem, but a million of them
organized under a creed that has set out to seize
power using an unelected bureaucracy is one of those
moments when a society must realize that its
corruption has become a liability to its own
survival.
We are of course far beyond idiot cousin territory.
Idiot cousin jobs were handmade, much like Solyndra
or other recent examples of crony capitalism. It's
mass production that turns a problem into a plague
and the mass production of government jobs began
around the same time that many other industries were
discovering that they could make money cranking out
vast numbers of identical copies of things.
The cities were the perfect mold for a new mass
produced bureaucracy. Not only did they have social
problems and political machines galore, but they
also had massive numbers of immigrants who came up
the hard way in the industrial age and wanted their
kids to have something better than they did. Drop
the kids into the mold, then mold them and plop them
into mass produced government jobs with the mission
of managing the unmanageable aspects of overcrowded
cities.
The parable of the industrial age is that of the man
who turns on a machine that won't stop. The modern
nightmare begins and ends with the question, "What
if we can't stop what we're doing?" While this
question has been applied to such diverse areas as
factories, nuclear weapons and mass culture, it's
rarely directed at government. Not government as a
vehicle for exploring the bomb, the surveillance
state or any of the trendy abuses of authority-- but
government itself. What we might ask will happen if
the machine doesn't turn off, if government just
doesn't stop growing?
It's not a question that concerns those who
preoccupy themselves with trendy
anti-authoritarianism, marking down the number of
surveillance cameras and denouncing some new
government program to listen in on people's phone
calls, but they never seem to make the connection to
the source of the problem. Somehow they imagine that
it is possible to have a society where people are
compelled to purchase health insurance, where meters
determine how often they recycle and where light
bulbs are banned not because they are toxic but
because they "waste energy"-- that won't put up
surveillance cameras or listen to their phone calls.
Government isn't Baskin-Robbins. You can't choose
the flavors of totalitarianism that you want. And
idiot cousins aren't very good at making fine
distinctions. Give them a script and they'll follow
it to their deaths. Ask them to use common sense and
you might as well ask them to build a moon rocket,
which happens to be one of those things that we
can't do anymore, ever since the idiot cousins took
over major chunks of the space program.
Over the last century the idiot cousins have turned
red and they are often no longer cousins, just
college graduates looking for a job in the unreal
world, but that hasn't made them any less dumb.
Ideological programming is to creativity and
flexibility as rat poison is to a fine luncheon.
People who are taught to think in political
formulations are just reading from another kind of
script and it's often a script that they don't even
understand.
There's a certain amount of hope in that. When no
one in the Soviet Union understood what the point of
Communism was, there was little resistance to being
done with it. It wasn't so much the courageous
struggle of dissidents that brought down the Soviet
Union, it was the incomprehension of the ranks of
idiots who parroted dogma and slogans that had been
coined by men and women who were smarter than them
by virtue of receiving a pre-Communist education in
an independent educational system.
By the time the Berlin Wall fell, most of the men
and women who made up the system did not see any
point to all this stuff about Communism. They knew a
hundred slogans, but not how they related to their
lives. They were all for maintaining the bribes and
bureaucracy culture, they just didn't see why it
couldn't be done in a totalitarian state with the
same standard of living as the West.
The good news is that if the left ever seizes
complete control, their system will collapse within
two to three generations because at some point no
one will understand why everyone has to live without
heat or listen to inspirational stories about Caesar
Chavez.. The bad news is that by then it will be too
late to ever rebuild the country into a workable
place to live.
The beauty of the machine is still embedded in the
fascist undercoating of progressive government. It
is a vision of a dozen wise men pulling the switch
while ten million overseers mechanically drive three
hundred million people to their tasks. The plan is
formulated, the blueprints are drawn up, the smart
men look it over through their monocles and then the
whole thing is fired up and it falls over a cliff
because the theory is all wrong.
The left has rejected the industrialization of
mechanical things, but it remains deeply in love
with the mechanization of human beings, the mass
production of impulses and the programming of their
souls. It is constantly drawing up five year plans
to achieve one social goal or another, and if the
five year plans never succeed, then that just means
that it's time for an even more ambitious ten year
plan to fight people who use too much water or don't
teach their children tolerance.
But the reasons why machines work is because people
design them. Machines however cannot design
machines. When the average functionary is as devoid
of autonomy and innovative thinking as your Windows
PC, then the society will begin crashing as it
encounters errors not in its programming. Deploying
masses of asses to tackle social problems while
following a rigid script filled with inflexible
assumptions is a surefire way to fail and use that
as an excuse to throw more men at the job.
Failure is built into the system. Large armies of
men following orders is a good way to grind down
equally large armies. It's not a way to run a
country. Human industrialization creates
bureaucratic hives which worsen everything they
touch. It fills the country with functionaries
following scripts that require them to confiscate
our freedoms for our own good, a good that even in
their limited definition they cannot achieve.
The very inflexibility of the idiot cousins
guarantees their tenure. The more they fail, the
more of them are needed. If we spent X amount of
money to achieve Y without achieving it, then next
time we must spend X+2. It's the linear mechanical
logic of the idiot who can only think in terms of
tackling every problem with more resources until it
finally cracks. If our last machine didn't do it,
then our massive EDUTRON 2000 which is twice as big
and costs twice as much will surely educate all our
children properly.
We have been throwing idiot cousins are the war on
poverty, at discrimination and at overeating. And
now we're poorer, more bigoted and fatter than we
used to be. Given another generation we'll have
trouble getting up out of bed at the homeless
shelter long enough to carry out hate crimes. That's
not the official progressive party line which says
that we are more tolerant than we used to be, even
as they discover five new kinds of bigotry over the
weekend. And as for poverty, it's tempting to say
that the only people who got rich fighting poverty
were the idiot cousins, but even they are worse off
in a country which is poorer than ever and which can
only afford fattening food.
Like the Soviet Union, the progressive agenda never
fails, it just succeeds so much that it moves on to
fight new challenges, like racist babies, the
imminent destruction of the planet and understanding
how right wing talk show hosts brainwash people into
hating all their programs. There are never defeats,
only strategic retreats. Each setback is an
opportunity to create a new agency full of idiot
cousins with a 40 billion dollar budget in order to
"invest in our future".
We have been investing so much in our future lately,
that we may not even have a future anymore. Forget
peak oil, we are rapidly reaching peak government.
Our exploitation of our human resources is
unsustainable. Eventually we will have bankrupted
the future due to all our investing in the future in
such promising present day stocks as Idiot Cousins
Inc, better known as the entire monumental structure
of government and its assorted camp followers
looking for a chance to wash clothes, hold a
fundraiser or make off with a fat government
contract.
Hoover promised two chickens in every pot, but
while the price of chicken is rising, our current
leaders offer us two bureaucrats, inspectors,
managers, disarrangers and assorted euphemisms for
unelected but impossible to get rid of miniature
tyrants, to every family that works for a living.
The human machine that the left keeps building in
our backyard doesn't work. It can never work and it
refuses to go away. It only keeps getting bigger and
bigger. The builders don't understand that it's not
the fault of the machine, it's the fault of the
theory. The machine does what it's designed to do
which is carry out a linear process. It will not
however transform humanity. Nor will it clean up
after itself.
A machine of ten million human parts is far dumber
than any single human being. It is far less
competent, far less capable and far more cruel. It
will fail at all but the simplest tasks because it
has no soul, it has no conscience, it has no mind
and it has no common sense. Its very operation
creates more problems than it can hope to solve. It
is not a solution. It and its operators, the idiot
cousins who fill its metal chambers, are the
problem. They are our problem.