Not With a Bang but a Whimper

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The Hollow Men - TS Eliot

With all due apologies to T.S. Eliot, this is truly remarkable:

The rich (bureaucrats) keep getting richer

USA Today reports that federal salaries have increased rapidly during the recession, leading to an explosion of six-figure salaries in the public sector:

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

Bureaucracy is the real recession-proof industry.  The numbers are mind-boggling.  In 18 months, the number of federal employees making over $100K have increased 46%.  The number making over $150K has more than doubled.

It’s not as if they’ve been asked to do more with less, either.  In the first six months of the year, the federal government was adding 10,000 jobs per month, and over the recession had grown the ranks of bureaucrats by 9.8%.  The private sector, during that same period, shed 7.3 million jobs to contract 6.3%.

Here’s the fun fact of the day from USA Today:

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

Got that?  Seventeen hundred employees at DoT make $170,000 per year.  Eighteen months ago, there was one.

Bureaucracy arises initially to increase efficiency.  When the bureaucracy is small and primarily involved with facilitating the functioning of a system, it can actually add value.  However, as the bureaucracy grows, it inevitably (and often rather quickly) reaches the point where its own perpetuation and the enhancement of its power and resource utilization become primary motivators.  We have long since reached that point.  It seems that now our government is determined to move from the merely ridiculous to the completely absurd.  The goal, apparently, is to have so many people working for the bureaucracy, promulgating new rules controlling how we live our lives, that soon all commerce and progress will slowly grind to a halt.  At that point the last one out will not have to turn off the lights; the electricity will have already been turned off, crushed by the weight of regulation.

Can any good come out of this incredible expansion of government?

Two possibilities come to mind:

1) The backlash could lead to a resurgence in libertarian thinking in the Republican party.

2) There could be no greater spur to the establishment of Resilient Communities than an ossified, overweight, top heavy bureaucratized government.  At some point when you can no longer fight city hall and revolution is unlikely in the extreme, to "turn on, tune in, and drop out" will take on a whole new meaning.