Earlier this month, Peder Lund (aka The Boss) walked into the office of Paladin’s graphic designer, Jason Stowell, and asked him to make a poster from that definition.
After doing so, Jason emailed me to say, “Have I said how much I like working for this man?”
I hear ya, Jason.
Until that moment, I’d never heard the word ineptocracy. Near as I can tell, it’s been around the ’Net for about 10 years, origins unknown. But only last fall did it acquire that detailed definition and start making the online dictionaries.
Perhaps that’s because, right then, so many people discovered that Obama isn’t just a bad (e.g., overreaching, arrogant, lying, constitution-voiding, bought-and-paid-for) president, but a clumsy, weak one to boot. Who would ever have imagined that, given the well-organized and masterful campaign he ran to get where he is?
Ah well.
But let’s not make this about Obama. He’s just continuing in the grand tradition of George W. Bush, a man who felt entitled to be president — even though he couldn’t even bother to learn English properly — and who then proceeded to destroy our freedom in order to save it and (by his own admission) abandon the free market in order to save that.
But let’s not blame GWB either. Ineptocracy may be a new word, but it’s a long-standing form of U.S. government. Google “stupid government tricks” and you’ll get no shortage of examples. Why, the FAA and TSA alone provide enough ineptitude to keep bloggers entertained for years. And that’s without even mentioning the BATFE!
Amazingly, ineptocracy marches on, decade after decade, despite every promise of reform.
When Richard Nixon was president, he asked his advisors to find the stupidest organization in the entire federal government so he could campaign against it as an absurd example of waste. They came up with the Board of Tea Experts (founded 1897) and their official tea-taster. This silly board (whose work was already covered by U.S. tea importers) was tossed before the media, where it was duly and loudly ridiculed.
Yet, 30 years later taxpayers were still paying a federal official to taste their tea. The Board of Tea Experts was finally done in by the Clinton-Gore “reinventing government” project.
It takes more than three decades to get rid of an agency that everybody agrees is completely idiotic. But, then, nobody really cared about federal tea-tasters once they quit laughing at them.
So let’s look at another example: It takes more than 20 years to get rid of something Americans universally and truly loathed: the National Maximum Speed Law.
Ineptocracy in action, truly.
The “reinventing government” project, by the way, was designed to make the federal government “work better and cost less.” Noticed anything like that happening lately? Or ever?
And how about the bipartisan 1990s triumph to “end welfare as we know it”? How”s that working out for ya?
You see, that’s the thing about ineptocracy. And that’s why the word (though I hope it catches on) is a little misleading. Although it’s true that everybody from the voters to the candidates to the bureaucrats to the president himself appears increasingly inept, the system itself is a model of super-efficiency. The system of government is amazingly, entirely, super-competently successful in meeting its goals.
Because what is the inevitable answer to every botch, every stumble, every outrage, every abuse of power? MORE! Higher taxes. More government borrowing. More laws. More regulations. More enforcers. More bailouts. More handouts. More crackdowns. More agencies. More centralized power. More nannying. More, more, more!
In practice, we think we’re experiencing ineptocracy. In reality, what we have is a giant, parasitic organism — the federal government — that uses ineptitude with Darwinian skill to serve its own health and ensure its own survival.
Claire Wolfe is the author of the Paladin books The Bad Attitude Guide to Good Citizenship, Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook, and I Am Not a Number, and a contributor to The Paladin Book of Dangerously Fun Stuff and Tough Times Survival Guide, Vol. 2.