Any organisational structure given unlimited power and no
direct oversight by market forces will historically trend
toward this kind of behaviour,
Exactly. Absolutely right. The bureaucracy is like middle management gone berserk. The founders were onto something, they built something with incredible revenue potential, and were both the executives AND the workers. Then some middle management layers had to arise for coordination. Over time the separation between the executives and the workers grew to become a yawning gulf, and the middle managers captured the asylum.
Lacking any inherent ability to create value (like actual producers) nor any ability to be bold and take risks (like good executives), the legal bureaucracy/middle management just consumes more and more resources.
It can go on for quite sometime when you have a company producing as much revenue as USG. But in this case it won't go on forever, as China is now rising beyond USG.
Look at the statist lawyer pack currently continuously
stating that this is just business as usual in this case.
Yeah, this seemed weird to me too. The best way to understand it is that they were taught in law school that extralegal methods (whether Lincoln suspending habeas corpus or 60s sit-ins) are allowed if and only if they are in service of fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, or something similarly Nazi/KKK-ish. And for those who are not straight white males, which is the majority of today's new lawyers, they also believe (and are repeatedly told) that they owe their current positions/status to the federal government's past extralegal activities.
So they combine hatred for pre-1960s America with reverence for the 60s revolution and absolute fealty to the modern US federal government. Insofar as they ever critique it, it is almost always to strengthen it (more taxes, more laws, more regulations, more government). They used to push to weaken criminal penalties for actual criminals (Miranda) and to defund defense, but here too there's been kind of a recent change; the new breed of Sotomayor/Holder/Bloomberg/Obama types (along with the lawyers here) are actually pretty hardcore on both of those points. They are all about mandatory maximums and drone strikes.
The result is something similar to the first class of students raised after the 1917 revolution. Extralegal methods for the Great October Revolution were completely justified. But after that point complete obedience to the state was required; the only exception were extralegal methods that tended to increase the power of the state and be directed against various libertarians, reactionaries, dissidents, or running dogs. When they felt they were still fighting against Russian culture, they pushed to reduce penalties against criminals; but once they felt they were fully in command the harshness of everything ramped way up beyond where it was pre-Revolution.
Lacking any inherent ability to create value (like actual producers) nor any ability to be bold and take risks (like good executives), the legal bureaucracy/middle management just consumes more and more resources.
It can go on for quite sometime when you have a company producing as much revenue as USG. But in this case it won't go on forever, as China is now rising beyond USG.
Yeah, this seemed weird to me too. The best way to understand it is that they were taught in law school that extralegal methods (whether Lincoln suspending habeas corpus or 60s sit-ins) are allowed if and only if they are in service of fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, or something similarly Nazi/KKK-ish. And for those who are not straight white males, which is the majority of today's new lawyers, they also believe (and are repeatedly told) that they owe their current positions/status to the federal government's past extralegal activities.So they combine hatred for pre-1960s America with reverence for the 60s revolution and absolute fealty to the modern US federal government. Insofar as they ever critique it, it is almost always to strengthen it (more taxes, more laws, more regulations, more government). They used to push to weaken criminal penalties for actual criminals (Miranda) and to defund defense, but here too there's been kind of a recent change; the new breed of Sotomayor/Holder/Bloomberg/Obama types (along with the lawyers here) are actually pretty hardcore on both of those points. They are all about mandatory maximums and drone strikes.
The result is something similar to the first class of students raised after the 1917 revolution. Extralegal methods for the Great October Revolution were completely justified. But after that point complete obedience to the state was required; the only exception were extralegal methods that tended to increase the power of the state and be directed against various libertarians, reactionaries, dissidents, or running dogs. When they felt they were still fighting against Russian culture, they pushed to reduce penalties against criminals; but once they felt they were fully in command the harshness of everything ramped way up beyond where it was pre-Revolution.