Frogs And Oceans

Incrementalism is an effective tool when the goal is to impose something on "the people" that the people don't really want. It looks a lot like intentionally pushing folks down the proverbial slippery slope, but more subtle. The undesirable changes need to be added much more slowly so as to be as imperceptible as possible, so that in the end no one can figure out how we came to a terrible end. What started out as a warming bath became boiling a frog, a frog that never new it was what's for dinner. 

It turns out you cannot un-boil a frog. Just cannot be done. The only option is to boil the ocean, radical, dramatic change, done with urgency and purpose, the purpose of throwing out that pot of water and the frog it cooked. Now a lot of folks will say "you can't boil the ocean" and these folks would be incrementalists, who'd much rather boil a frog and further insist that no one else should be allowed to do anything else. Then along comes someone who can, and will boil the ocean. 

That's where we are.

While we can only watch what is happening at the national level, at the local level we may, only may, have time. Maybe not, but we have a little time to find out.

There are voices on social media touting expansion of our local administrative state, advocating mission creep, costs and financial consequences be damned. Well, to be clear, there is one outspoken voice harping on "investing in ourselves" without offering any credible notion of ROI. That voice is shrill, delving into insults and ageism, often targeting the very voters who voted FOR the city referendum, without which this voice would be mute. Or at least totally irrelevant.

What's missing is a bit of history, and a decent respect for it. Before there was a City of Dunwoody, there was a marketing effort, a damn good one, to get voters to support the referendum creating the city. The Big Tent of this effort, under which all other issues were discussed was Local Control. The three rings in this big top were: zoning; police; and paving. Notice anything missing? Like parks, and interstate lanes paved in other peoples' front yards paid for with other peoples' money? What the electorate was sold was zoning to slow apartment development, police that wouldn't start every shift driving down to Buford Highway, and fixing our pothole riddled streets, backed up by the CVI study saying this could be done on $18M ($27M in 2025 dollars). That's what 81% of the voters thought they were getting, and that's what they still want. 

Now that is not what they got and what they actually approved was a mini-me of a the federal administrative state which has followed the lead in mission creep and bureaucratic expansion. And the water will slowly, inexorably heat, until we must confront the necessity of boiling our own little ocean of rancid frog stew. 

Unless we do something now.

The List

Now more than ever it seems folks in this country are talking past one another. This may be due to some recent events and two very different perspectives held by folks in the U.S. The dividing line seems obvious.

In the U.S. 22-23 million people are government employees, not including military personnel (soldiers), of which estimates indicate around 3 million employed directly by the federal government. The rest are state and local. This also does not include direct contractors, and certainly not grant addicted organizations funneling dollars into their payroll as this is impossible to measure. For reference there are approximately 164 million workers in the U.S., so about 13.5% of the workforce is directly employed by some government. The median pay for a government employee is $111K/yr compared to an ordinary man at $63K/yr and an ordinary woman at $53K/yr. The male/female pay disparity is not relevant to THIS diatribe, the gov/citizen IS, as the gov gets 76% more than the others. This pay disparity is one part of the great divide.

To say that these folks "work for the government" is somewhat deceptive, as we hold to the notion that we live in a democratic republic, where perhaps these employees are somehow, though somewhat indirectly, beholding to the electorate. Nothing could be further from the truth. These are employees of the administrative state, and while established by congress (by referendum for the City of Dunwoody), they operate without meaningful oversight or review. Inspectors General are not and have never been the answer, look no further than Atlanta to see what happens when one tries to do the job. The fact is, the creators of the administrative state are its fiercest defenders, having established rules making it virtually impossible to fire any government employee, under any practical circumstance, except during probation. The Musk-ovites are using this blunt tool because it is the only one the administrative statists have allowed. These job guarantees not only undermine any systemic improvements in efficacy, they ensure expansion of the state. If someone is overwhelmed by the job, the state cannot "upgrade the position" with someone more capable, they have to add personnel and associated costs. This is how Dunwoody got an Assistant City Manager. 

This brings us to The List, which in full is The Layoff List. If you work in the real world, where companies and their employees contribute to the GDP, then your name is probably somewhere on The List. Companies use this list to remove poor performers, replacing them with better hires. Jack Welch devised a scheme of stack-ranking employees, clipping off the bottom 5-10% and replacing them to improve the team. Annually. Unlike the administrative state, private employers, and their employees, must compete, the former against other businesses, and the latter against current, and future, colleagues. This competition can be a harsh mistress, with some companies shutting down entire business units, not because they aren't profitable, but because they have inadequate margins. Can you even imagine the administrative state closing a government agency because they're not getting the job done? Neither can employees of the administrative state. 

This is why ordinary, free-enterprise workers have little to no sympathy for administrative state employees, who they see as overpaid, under-productive and ineffective.They see themselves paying taxes to support government employees, and while government employees do pay taxes, everyone knows where they actually get the money to do so. What the Musk-ovites are doing might appear to the administrative state to be indiscriminate slash and burn, but to folks on The List it is standard operating procedure. Those on The List see defenders of the administrative state who advocate a "surgical approach" as employing a Deny, Defend, Depose strategy to preserve the status quo. The Musk-ovites are also foreshadowing what will come, sooner or later, to state and local levels of the administrative state. Perhaps a reduction in federal largess will precipitate some changes at that brown-beige building on Ashford Dunwoody. Don't hold your breath.