Remember, remember! The fifth of November
Time for fireworks
In the UK it’s Guy Fawkes night when they remember “the only person to enter parliament with honest intentions”.
His intention was to blow the place sky high killing the king, his ministers and all the members of parliament. This was not unlike what Al Qaeda wanted to do to the USA in 2001 and for not entirely unrelated reasons - i.e. religion - as Mr Fawkes was a Catholic fundamentalist who wanted to restore England to Catholicism.
He failed and was caught. And ever since English people have been lighting bonfires and setting off fireworks on November 5th to celebrate his being caught.
These days, however, I wonder how many Englishmen would support a latter day Guy? Probably not the religious part, but killing all the MPs? I could see that getting significant traction. Probably much the same across the Atlantic where coincidentally they are having a rather important set of elections.
Mind you these days, blowing up Parliament (or Congress) won’t do any good. We know from the last four years that you can have a senile president and government continues around him. We know from the short-lived Liz Truss Prime Ministership that the British Deep State will oppose would-be reformers, at best just passively ignoring their commands but at worst actively sabotaging things in the background.
Trump of course discovered the same thing in the US during his first presidency.
So a modern day Guy needs to take out the top levels of the civil service and probably quite a lot of the lower layers too. They literally do very little that is productive. As Matt Ridley noticed recently, in the UK (and I expect every other country) public sector productivity has barely risen in 30 years despite that time having
seen the emergence of e-commerce, mobile data, sat-nav, LED lighting and so much in the way of labour-saving, cost-saving technology.
Firing them and removing their clearances and security accesses is probably enough, we don’t need to copy North Korea and literally fire them from guns (though one can see the attraction, particularly for the ones who led us into the COVIDiocy).
Aside: this podcast, mostly about the COVIDiocy is fascinating and depressing
Anyway back to the proper approach to government. It is notable that the putative Trump transition team appears to have learned from the experience of 2016 and is deciding to not cooperate with the DC bureaucrats this time. This is reasonable given that Trump appears to be quite serious in appointing Elon Musk (possibly assisted by Ron Paul) to work on making government less bloated. No bureaucrat ever has been willing to work with people who want to reduce the number of underlings he has or the power he has to tell people what to do.
Anyway here’s hoping the US elects people who decide to create a British Guy Fawkesian bonfire of paperwork and lots of fireworks from upset bureaucrats
PS The UK Mirror Newspaper has a nice album of bonfire night related pictures through the ages. Recently, sadly, “Elf’n’safety” and other bureaucratic BS has stopped the more exuberant amateur celebrations of the past and turned the whole thing into officially organized mandatory fun
You need to realize that the way to get on in the public service is to never make a mistake. The best way to do this is to never make a decision and to do as little work as possible.
Yep and perhaps write a book 'bout it; The Bonfire Of Inanities.