Thread by @Doc_0

The constant refrain in "Five Days at Memorial," a book and TV series about a hospital grappling with the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is "no one is in charge." As many crises have proved since then, from the pandemic to Afghanistan, that's still true.

Our multi-trillion-dollar mega-government has no idea how to respond to a crisis or fulfill its duties to the American people, even though thousands of officials are paid handsome salaries for years on end to devise plans and protocols.

Government agencies think of little beyond expanding their missions, demanding more funds, and above all HIRING PEOPLE. Expanding their staff is how they capture more bureaucratic turf and resist calls to trim the fat. The fat of the Leviathan State is people who can't be fired.

All those plans the bureaucracy creates are threadbare and lazy, consisting mostly of conference calls with other agencies who invariably insist they are are ready to handle any contingency - but they aren't, and nobody does the legwork to follow up and double-check their claims.

We've seen this time and again, most spectacularly during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, where one day you had a bevy of senior officials confidently insisting their gigantic, hideously overfunded agencies were ready for anything - and the next day the whole system collapsed.

Overfunding is a big problem because it pays for an army of bureaucrats who file tons of paperwork to create the illusion of competence. Enormous budget numbers are presented as proof the agency is 100% ready for battle, but the whole system collapses immediately in a crisis.

Overfunding also encourages mission creep, in which agencies that are secretly inept at their core missions launch new bureaucratic crusades so they can push for even MORE funding. That's how you get a "Centers for Disease Control" that was obsessing over gun control.

There's a character in "Five Days at Memorial," a low-level cubicle dweller, who actually picks up the phone and starts calling agencies for help - only to find all of them folded like a house of cards as soon as the hurricane hit, nobody's in charge, no one can do anything.

All these years after Katrina, the American people are still groaning under the burden of supporting a bloated, irresponsible money-no-object government that can't actually DO anything except spend money and defend itself against spending cuts.

It's a republic of paperwork that employs a staggering number of people, but delivers microscopic tangible value for every man-hour worked or taxpayer dollar spent. The vast majority of those people would produce far more value for society if they worked in the private sector.

Not just dollars, but a gigantic army of PEOPLE, have been sucked into an incompetent monstrosity that spends its time writing up plans that cannot be executed and giving itself top marks for performance. Absolutely nothing was learned from one horrific failure after another.