The Rise of the Managerial Class

How credentialed midwits infesting bureaucracies can drag nations into moribundity and stagnation

Great Britain is decaying before our eyes. I began work on a 3-nation case study: Great Britain, South Africa, and Hungary. I’ll probably complete it next year, when all of the the information is outdated and the predictions overtaken (just a reminder-I’m also trying to finish my series on treating mental and physical illness in a hyper-consumer economy like ours, and I continue to chip away at my piece on the social and biological categories of men/male versus women/female, not to mention the four-dozen draft documents I have saved on here. Focus, especially long-term focus, has never been a personal strength). I don’t want to go into too much detail here but I will provide a bare summary: Great Britain’s economy stagnates. It consistently has the worst or second-worst labor productivity metrics in Europe. Government debt has ballooned (even under the Tory party, which is a valid clue that the Tories do not represent the policies they claim to). Soon its per capita GDP will be roughly equivalent to Bulgaria’s. It is experiencing drastic social issues connected to immigration (especially Muslim immigration; and the values-shifts that has entailed), policing; and gender ideology, especially in education. Confidence in the government as an administrative tool and as a vehicle for the execution of popular will is at its lowest in 50 (perhaps 100) years. What is going on?

Great Britain has suffered for a long time under policies that any competent social scientist or economist could tell you are ill-advised. It has a large and over-funded bureaucracy and hasn’t had the same success as Scandinavia in liberalizing and streamlining its social services. The NHS (the single-payer healthcare system) costs more than ever and has much lower effectiveness than any time in the past. The country has arcane and burdensome labor regulations that put extra costs on employers and protect substandard and ill-fitting employees by making firing, hiring, and transferring far more difficult. It has greenbelt and community board regulations that essentially allow any NIMBY’s (‘not-in-my-backyard’) to stall or abandon large construction projects. Consequently Great Britain has not built a new power plant in 25 years and Heathrow Airport (the country’s main air travel hub) is now +40 years overdo for a major expansion. These kinds of rules act as a emergency brake on economic growth, essentially making it impossible to continue to grow the economy, even as the population rises and expectations continue to climb. This causes dissatisfaction with the political system and a growing awareness that neither of the main electoral parties (Labor & Tories) have any intention of reforming these issues, regardless of what they say.

I won’t describe them here but the country also has a huge reservoir of discontent around liberal (some would say reckless or self-destructive) immigration policies and gender ideology in schools, non-profits, and cultural institutions. Recently the London Metropolitan Police have displayed a long-building set of intersecting trends publicly and blatantly: (1) their enthusiasm for harassing and even arresting (+3000 people last year) private citizens for non-threatening and non-defamatory social media posts or public statements on controversial topics (one of the policies which allows this is the “non-crime hate incident” policing category, which was supposedly rewritten/curtailed… except that no one seems to have told police this). (2) their distinct lack of appetite for confronting large groups with political momentum, or indeed any offender or set of offenders who are non-white, immigrant, Muslim, or LGBTQ. People with British flags have been escorted away from protests and arrested. People simply stating that there’s a difference between men and women online have had serious investigations opened on them. A young autistic girl who exclaimed that a female police officer “looked like [her] lesbian nana” (a simple observation by the teen… not an attempt to harass) was arrested and the police officer in question was captured on film weeping at the trauma of it all. Yes: an autistic teen girl was arrested for observing that a law enforcement officer looked like a family member. Meanwhile crowds of people chant murderous slogans, graffiti the most cherished monuments in Britain, and form gangs that rape hundreds of working-class girls for years… all without any investigation or repercussions, despite the constant and noisy pressure from Brits to do something.

How could this be? What is causing all of this institutional dysfunction? Unsurprisingly, there is a common factor in all of these problems and it’s a cautionary lesson for other Western democracies. Great Britain has been captured by the managerial class. Its system became too beholden (captive) to a thick layer of middle-managers, bureaucrats, and activists, and so pressure from below (the grassroots and everyday citizens appalled at what’s happening in their country) and above (politicians, even prime ministers and monarchs) is dissipated without any real changes happening or persisting.

Net Zero is a terrible policy. It aims to cripple the British economy and retard growth and wealth creation even more (explicitly avowing to limit intercontinental; shipping and regional travel and international air travel by Britons, and reduce their per capita GDP by additional degrees) in order to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. The world’s emissions are already declining and the best way to accelerate that process (without impoverishing billions) is to continue to invest in energy grids and power production and technology. Net Zero is not fundamentally about global warming. Rather, it’s about an ideology (seen also at the World Economic Forum and propounded by Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates and a hundred other oligarchs) which strives to simplify and control and restrict the wealth and travel and freedom of everyday people. These things are wasteful artifacts of our hyper-consumption “late-stage capitalism” and can be jettisoned without any loss to aggregate happiness, according to these people… people just need to stop focusing on their houses and cars and businesses and futures so much, and learn to enjoy their rental, low-ownership, vegan lifestyle.

Naturally this movement is deeply unpopular… except for some cultish young people and a large segment of ideologically-captured bureaucrats and academics and managers in Great Britain. 3 out of 4 Britons oppose Net Zero, yet it is still the official platform of both parties and is enthusiastically supported King Charles (who has been a religious devotee of the ideology for decades). I could describe a dozen other issues affecting everyday life in which the desires and designs of a small segment of middle-managers and party leaders continue to be fulfilled, in desperate opposition to the wishes (and voting behavior of the masses). This model is barely a democracy. It’s government by managers, and it what (most of) the Left has engineered in Canada… and ardently desires in the United States. While they use the rhetoric of democracy and minority empowerment, they employ the tactics and share the aim of elitists and socialist bureaucrats throughout history: personal power and privilege.

“The first step to solving any problem is admitting that there is a problem.” - The Big Book of AA

Thanks for reading!

The Cenotaph is the main British monument for war dead. During the last Remembrance Day, people with British flags were menaced, poppies (the traditional symbol of war commemoration) were destroyed, and the Cenotoph was vandalized by a 100,000-person Hamas/Plaestinian protest, which was organized for the same day. Bystanders begged the Met to intervene but they refused.

Such a protest (amidst weeks of similar protests) on a day like that with behavior like that isn’t simply a bid to raise awareness of an issue-it’s a show of force.