Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
The Careening Corrupt Government of Bureaucrats
All the blue states are busy pushing tax increases. They don't seem to be proposing expensive new programs. So what gives?
OK. So we all know about the fraud. Look no further than California and Minnesota. Fortunately all the other blue states are fraud free. Wink wink…
But I just read a piece by Quillette’s boss Claire Lehmann titled “The Party of the Worker is Now the Party of the Bureaucrat.” She writes about her time working in Canberra for the Department of Health and Aging. Until she couldn't take it anymore.
But first, as a teenager and a college student, she worked in restaurants. So she knows what work means.
When Lehman worked for the department it hac 4-5000 employees. Now it has 7000. Here’s how it went.
On my first rotation, I was reprimanded for writing a ministerial letter too quickly. Two hours was sufficient time to write a letter I thought—one that mostly consisted of copy and pasting boilerplate from other letters—but according to the director of the team, I needed to take a day.
Why? Because they had nothing else for me to do. There were no meetings, no policies being drafted, and no conference papers for us to work on. So we had morning tea instead. And afternoon tea. We took long lunches. We did crossword puzzles to keep our brains active, and daily “quizzes” to alleviate the boredom. The Director of the section once sent a ministerial letter back to me asking me to delete a comma. I was excited. Because deleting a comma meant that I had something to do.
Do you get the point? Government agencies just go from year to year, increasing the wages, increasing the work-force, increasing the pensions. And deleting commas.
And they need more money. And the.politicians depend on the bureaucrats’ union to get out the vote. And so they need more taxes.
Now you understand why California has a billionaire’s unrealized assets tax on the ballot. And why Washington State is pushing an income tax and an estate tax.
And, by the way, as Sir Keir Starmer steps down an UK Prime Minister, he is said to have complained that he would pull the lever and nothing would happen. In Yes, Minister the joke was that the bureaucrats were a lot smarter than the politicians. Maybe not. But maybe they are powerful enough that they can ignore orders from the politicians, and get away with it.
And that's not even dealing with the fact, as I read the other day, that about 25 percent of the labor force in the US works for the government and about 15 percent more in government adjacent jobs.
Now I read a review of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field.
Furious Minds opens with an epigraph intended to liken her subjects to Nazis, and the tone hardly lightens thereafter…
[Field] is especially animated whenever shades of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt—who defined the political sphere as grounded in the distinction between friends and enemies—appear in a conservative author.
Writer Gregory Conti asks whether invoking the shade of “Nazi jurit Carl Schmitt” isn’t making Schmitt’s point. That “there is no politics without an enemy,” as Curtis Yarvin interprets him.
Field is a political theorist by training, so interpreting primary texts would be, one suspects, her forte. Where one might expect to find detailed exegesis, one often encounters either a testimonial from another commentator decrying the person in question as racist or misogynist, or an allegation of guilt by association along the lines that such-and-such figure quoted Carl Schmitt, or knew some unsavory white nationalist years prior.
Cue Sun Tzu about not knowing your enemy. Because our liberal friends do not get the point of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political. That’s because they have merged the political and the moral and think, with Barack Obama, that they are bending the arc of history towards justice rather than merely beating on their enemies and gifting their friends.
I think that right now we hard-rightists are developing a pretty good ammunition depot with boxes and boxes of explosives about corruption, fraud, and the whole back-scratching NGO world. And the dysfunctional bureaucracy that orders the politicians to increase taxes.
It’s pretty obvious what is coming. Some intellectuals are going to get together a good narrative on the injustice of the current high tax low performance government. The next Trump, or next Trump but one, will match the ideas with his political genius.
And the world will change.
But it probably has to get worse before it gets better. My gut feeling is that we will need women to decide that the current regime does not protect them. Because “women expect to be protected.” And indeed that politics has never protected women. The only thing that really protects a woman is a husband.
Hey, I could be wrong!
| Tue, 23 Jun 2026 04:30:01 GMT |
There's a Fresh Face in Britland
All the established political parties in the West are hurting. If it’s the US, we have the old-line Democrats being pummeled by the DSA far left and the moderate Republicans being pummeled by the populist hard center.
In Britland the two parties that have dominated politics since just after World War I, Conservative and Labour, are both being eclipsed, by Reform on the right and by the Green Party on the left.
Yesterday in Britain a potential replacement for Labour Party Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham, was elected to Parliament in a by-election in the constituency of Makersfield.
But will anything change? Obviously not, because the fundamental fact about modern government, especially in Britain, is that it spends up to 50% GDP on handouts. And the one thing that will cause a political party to implode is cutting the handouts. No fresh face leading an existing political party will make a blind bit of difference.
The universal rule in modern politics is to rile up your supporters against an enemy, and offer them handouts. President Roosevelt railed against the economic royalists and gave handouts to the working class, including jobs in the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration and then Social Security. But President Johnson declared a War on Poverty — “poverty, disease, and ignorance” — and proposed to cure it with Great Society handout programs from Medicare to Medicaid. Subsequently Democrats declared racists the enemy and “affirmative action” the solution. And then bigots in general as the enemy and DEI as the solution. President Reagan declared economic stagnation the enemy and proposed a handout of tax rate cuts — but no spending cuts.
Today, Sen. Warren (D-MA) says that with her “ultra-millionaire wealth tax we could pay for child care for all three and four year olds in America.”
It’s really not that hard. Politics always reduces to an enemy and a handout. Politicians nimbly skip from yesterday’s enemy to tomorrow’s villain. But the handout stays, because all humans demand that the handouts they enjoy are their’s by right and any reduction would be a vile injustice.
It is interesting to me that both here in the US and in Europe the ruling class has augmented its supporters with ramped-up immigration that sidesteps normal bureaucratic procedures with the notion of “asylum seekers.” The immigrants require decades of government handouts before finding their feet in the new society, and they know which party is pushing the handouts.
And the ruling class has funneled handouts to its elite supporters, as it should, with grants and NGOs and extensive administrative supervision of its handout programs for the lower class.
Now, in my view we should transform pension and healthcare programs into mandatory IRA savings accounts and health insurance programs that keep healthcare recipients in touch with prices. But how to do with without a rebellion from today’s recipients?
Maybe education would be a better place to start, by nuking the public schools and universities from orbit — since all education professionals are Democrats — and funding parents for child education and getting employers to pay for credentials.
Put it this way: how could we transform politics so that the enemy is the Director of Handouts and the recipient of government handouts is shamed as a moral leper?
I have no idea.
But one thing is for sure. The educated elite and a century of social programs have made things worse.
| Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:18:08 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Do politicians know what they are doing, or just do what they know?
It isn’t a lie if nobody calls you on it.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: An Analysis of Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer Theory
