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Notes -
My assertion is that "bread and circuses" comes in the form of government creating [the need for] bullshit jobs for people who won't tolerate not having a job. We could make education vastly more efficient, and we could take away the degree pipeline for people whose jobs won't require them, and we could demolish most of the regulations that mean companies have to retain certain kinds of employees, and we could dismantle a good chunk of the administrative state.
But we won't do that. And the reason we won't do that is because the people in these positions are a significant (and politically powerful) fraction of the population who won't accept having "no place" in the economy, and they won't accept being consigned to a basic income that pays the underclass the same as them (or dependent on homemaking for an [indirect] income)- they're capable of doing more damage in a revolt, so governments obviously have to pay them more to make them not do that (which, come to think of it, is a major problem with UBI that I've never heard anyone discuss before).
I'm arguing that the people who work in those fields are, to a significant degree, themselves welfare recipients, and thus "the people who work in the education-managerial complex and support increasing the size of the education system and mandating companies increase the number of management jobs" is equivalent to "welfare recipient voting for more welfare", even though said welfare recipient might not fully recognize it as such (because the system is laundered through the guise of employment).
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