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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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She also claims that were the DoE disbanded, half of the people would go to the Dept. of Labor (where DoE originated from) and others would go to places like Dept. of Health and Human Services. That removing the DoE wouldn't really do anything except push bureaucrats around.

I don't think is the argument she thinks it is. All that does is paint a target on two more departments that should probably be axed as well. The point is not to push bureaucrats around, it's to have fewer bureaucrats. As Milei has put it, afuera!

She's deeply motivated to help the less-fortunate, but also seems like the exact type of bureaucratic cat lady people are complaining about.

Yes, exactly this. This kind of bureaucrat should not be paid by the taxes of productive people. If they were actually providing value, they would be remunerated in private enterprise by people who need to produce products or services in exchange for revenue, and their remuneration would be constrained by the revenue they could generate.

Two of my in-laws are a pair of public school teachers, and I think the same thing about them. If they were truly valuable, they would be working in private schools where the school itself must generate revenue by performing valuable functions, not simply awarded money by the state which is extracted from captive taxpayers. Thus, they are not valuable, and are instead parasitic.

It's not a very nice way to think about your relatives, but it's the inescapable conclusion I come to.

It's at least using taxes to put some money back into some peoples' hands.

The people, in this case, being the administrators of the institutions that end up receiving these funds. I say administrators, because that is what has seen the growth in employment in the last two decades.

If they were truly valuable, they would be working in private schools where the school itself must generate revenue by performing valuable functions, not simply awarded money by the state which is extracted from captive taxpayers. Thus, they are not valuable, and are instead parasitic.

This is highly confounded by the fact that public spending has greatly crowded out the private school market. If your option is a public school which costs (after taxes and fees) nothing vs. a private school of about the same quality and costs thousands of dollars a semester, it would be irrational to take the latter option. If public schools didn't exist at all, there would undoubtedly be more private schools, needing to hire more teachers.

Yes, but those private school teachers would be (and are) more liable for results, as a teacher failing to teach would result in parents pulling their kids. Same thing with administrators, as they’re strictly a cost center.

That is in stark contrast to what we have now, where they’re functionally impossible to fire consistently for anything less than literally fucking the students.

One reason why it's best to fire en masse and then rehire as needed.

No (wo)man, no problem.

Fortunately for the statistically average bureaucrat, we have an aversion to physically removing them as ancient societies would do (since they’d all be men).

Unfortunately for the average bureaucrat, they’ll be financially ruined. Career prospects for former welfare recipients are not great- good thing they didn’t import a ton of workers that don’t even make a minimum wage too slim to support a decent lifestyle through a cost disease they pushed for… oh wait, that’s exactly what they did.

The Progressive party machine is, quite literally, their only lifeline. And they know it only exists so long as they continue tricking young women into thinking they’ll get a permanent paycheque out of [young] men if they keep voting for it in a pyramid scheme even larger than Social Security.

It’s a faction of Amway ladies.

And they know it only exists so long as they continue tricking young women into thinking they’ll get a permanent paycheque out of [young] men if they keep voting for it in a pyramid scheme even larger than Social Security.

What trick? The bureaucracy is only expanding.

Yes, the distorting effect of government is one of its worst features.