Should the DC Swamp be Drained?

Definitely. But maybe we need to be careful as we do it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Now I will say this, you won't often find me carrying water for politicians. Frankly, they do not need my help, nor do I care particularly to give them their to give them any support they ain't really earned. However, I do think we need to have a good, honest, fair conversation about what we call the deep state. Now the deep state, we often accuse it of being a swamp of it being only self-interested parties and politicians all shuffling money and influence and power around to each other, but I want to bring up a couple things here to help us better understand the issue. There are some folks who have put every single one of their points into politics. It is either into being the head of something or to being the tail end of something that wags but is continually fed off of a very secure job frame. That's the first thing to know about it. Working for the government is generally good job security. Partly because your wages do not always depend on your performance. In fact, like a lot of manufacturing jobs I've been at, you gotta do a pretty darn bad job in order to get fired from a government position. Or you just gotta tick off the wrong people. Take your pick. So being very secure in your job is something that I do not want to blame anybody for, but that is not, of course, the beginning, middle, or end of the story. One of those things is what's called compromite. Now, I know it can be a little bit scumbaggy to talk about matters like this, but compromite is the idea that I've got something that I can hold against you. It's kind of a leverage point of I know what you voted for and your constituents wouldn't like it, or I know who you slept with and it would ruin your reputation. That sort of thing is compromise. And if everybody's got it with everybody else, kind of like this great big death cult. If you go down, you go, I go down with you. Yeah, that's the threatening part of it, but the bonus part of it is that now you are part of an inside club, you're part of a brotherhood of sorts. That means you have access to all these things that you have to have compromised yourself for. So that's another thing to consider here is that for a lot of folks now, maybe who want to get out, they ain't got the ability to, so they seize it, because uh that might be the end of their life reputation. The third thing to think of is just the nature and the use and the really viral in nature of what we call bureaucracy. Now, on the one hand, it is meant to slow down the government. Things outlast the circumstances that brought them up so that ideally there's a little bit of a power check so that things can't happen too fast. Now, this is good when you want to slow down bad ideas, but when you're trying to slow down good ideas, eh, that gets to be a different issue. And keep in mind that between government schools and government work and a lot of different things, there's been a lot of talk in trying to get rid of the idea that there is such a thing as good and bad that is objective and universal. So that is one part of the nature of the bureaucracy is that it does to a small degree belong there. That is one of the difficult things, as I say, about removing the democracy uh bureaucracy is because it is supposed to serve a function. But then keep in mind too, when it is overtaken by ideology, an ideology that is in fact antithetical, by which I don't just mean it hates the idea of, but I mean it is built upon an idea which is the opposite and counteracting idea of another. So when I say that you are caught by people who are antithetical to the government of the country they are supposed to be stewards of, well, that does bring a bit of a mess into the mixture now. Because these people are entrenched in positions which are their jobs, are their lives and livelihoods, and there is too much risk for them to voluntarily leave it or leave it in any sort of way that might bring about justice and change. When you roll all those things together, I'm not saying that we shouldn't get rid of the state. It's a little bit like oh, I think it was G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Knew Too Much. It was that there's too much complication, too much utility to even punish some crimes, and I ain't saying it's right. I would much rather cast myself upon the mercy of the God who wrote Psalm 2. Blessed are all who take refuge in him. Therefore, ye kings be wise. So yeah. Maybe the swamp should just be drained, maybe the whole bureaucratic umbrella over government politics should just be burned to the ground, or maybe, just maybe. It's a much bigger issue than that. And we should tread carefully when we're trying to remove something that is so big and deep and arguably ought to stay.