Our Self-Colonized Nation

When the parasites stop riding along and start driving.

“Every successful system accumulates parasites.” That statement, quoted in Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control, was proposed as a law of nature by evolutionary biologist Thomas Ray back in the 1980s.

This is how we know that America is a very successful system indeed. But every system has a limit to how heavy a parasite load it can carry, and I think we’ve reached ours.

One often sees graphics like this:

They’re shocking, and yet not really because everyone knows it’s true, and you see it everywhere. For example:

No one believes that all these administrators create value commensurate with their numbers. Mostly they’re a drain on productivity.

These administrative jobs exist not because they add value, but because of politics (political machines need supporters on the government payroll, because those supporters’ jobs give them an incentive to vote even in low-turnout elections), because of regulatory pressure (often designed to increase administrative payrolls) and because of bureaucratic empire-building. Whether in government or corporate bureaucracy, having more people report to you makes you more important, and often more influential.

When it comes to the operation of government, though, there is a second level of parasitism. Once the government became big, and rich, and prone to handing out cash on the one hand, and interfering in everyone’s business on the other, it created whole industries dedicated to influencing its operations. How much growth? It’s huge, but hard to measure. Some might, as Jeff Bezos did, buy the Washington Post for political influence and, more importantly, protection. Many (most) nonprofits and NGOs exist for the purpose of influencing the government, as do Political Action Committees, public-employee unions, and the like.

But just picking two core measures, lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, D.C., the trend is ever-upward. Graphic generated by Grok, using BLS statistics:

• Lawyers (blue line, left axis): Steady, long-term growth since the 1970s, reflecting the expansion of the federal government, regulatory state, and legal services in the capital region. From ~16,000 in 1970 to nearly 49,000 recently.

• Lobbyists (red line, right axis): Shorter modern series (consistent data from 1998 onward). Sharp rise in the mid-2000s, peak around 2008, dip post-financial crisis, and recent rebound.

• Both professions have grown significantly over decades, but lawyers show smoother, more consistent expansion while lobbyist numbers are more cyclical (tied to major legislation, elections, and economic events).

Bottom line: Fast growth. Hey, when it’s raining goverment-money soup, you’d be a fool not to bring a bucket. And that goes way beyond the lawyers and lobbyists, they’re just an indication of the trend.

Now a certain amount of that is to be expected, and goes back to the early days of the Republic, when Presidents and Senators had to put up with regular visits by “office-seekers” — people seeking cushy government-job appointments, which in those days usually involved the Post Office, for the simple reason that it was the most-populous government operation.

But now whole sectors of the economy depend on government money. President Trump’s abolition of USAID cost thousands of phony-baloney jobs. The New York Times recently ran a tear-jerker piece on how people who lost cushy NGO positions funded by USAID money haven’t been able to obtain comparable private sector employment. "Sheryl Cowan, 57, was making $272,000 a year as a senior VP at a U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit when she was let go at the end of March 2025. Last month she had an online interview for a $19-an-hour job managing a Penzeys Spices store in Falls Church, Va." (Her husband also lost his job running a nonprofit that was 100% funded by U.S.A.I.D. My take: If your nonprofit or NGO goes out of business without government money, it’s just an arm of the government seeking deniability. And freedom from government pay scales!)

These victims receive a lot more compassion than the laid off coal miners and steelworkers who were dismissively told to “learn to code” a few years ago. But someone whose labor is valued at $19 an hour in the private sector who can make well over a quarter million a year is doing better than any 19th Century assistant postmaster in the cushy-job department.

Even the sympathetic Times piece acknowledges: “Others acknowledged that there was bloat and waste in the agency and a need for reform. Much of the $35 billion it managed in 2024 went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to people in need overseas. The success of many projects was hard to measure.”

Most of it went to Washington-based contractors. The purpose of a system is what it does, and what U.S.A.I.D. did was put money in the pockets of Washington-based contractors. By a curious coincidence, these same contractors almost always vote Democratic, and have turned the state of Virginia blue. (And it will be even bluer if the disputed Virginia redistricting effort, which was designed to amplify the political power of the Northern Virginia Washington suburbs, succeeds).

As you might imagine, pumping all that money into people who will vote for spending lots of money is a recipe for spending more money later. And that’s what’s happened.

So is there a solution? Or will the government keep going until the parasites kill it?

Well, the parasites were attracted by the money. If you spread enough honey — or shit — around flies will come. Get rid of the money and that will get rid of the parasites. Of course, cutting government spending is hard, but as we find more and more fraud it looks like we might actually be able to eliminate the deficit by not paying people to sit in cushy offices doing nothing useful (and often something harmful).

The DOGE effect has demonstrated what can be done, and there wasn’t much of a political outcry from actual voters when U.S.A.I.D. was abolished. I think there’s room to slash more if — and this is a big if — there are Republicans willing to do it.

If — when — there’s a financial crisis for the federal government the cutting will be easier. In my own world of academia, financial crises are also opportunities, because they’re usually the only time you can cut bad programs. Same here.

But I want to spend a minute looking at the supply side. Peter Turchin has argued that we are suffering from an overproduction of elites, and I think he’s onto something. Starting in the 1970s, roughly, we sent a much larger number of people to college, and they pretty much all expected clean, well-compensated white-collar jobs. They also generally expected a degree of social status that could not realistically be bestowed on as many people as we were turning out from college. Social status is a positional good, and you can’t have everyone, or even a large number of people, as the “elite.” To some degree that was dealt with via different kinds of eliteness — academics weren’t financially elite, but they felt intellectually superior.

But there are still limits.

19th Century Europe, especially Britain, had this problem as more children, including those of the aristocracy, survived. You needed “an heir and a spare” — a male to inherit the property (it was entailed, so it could only go to one male heir, the firstborn). A second son could to to the Navy, third to the Army, fourth to the Church, and any others might have to make a go in banking or something. Past the second or third son, they weren’t as elite.

Or they could go abroad to the colonies, where every Englishman was elite. Go to India and you’d be a sahib regardless. And it was possible to make a lot of money, which wasn’t as good as a dukedom but wasn’t to be sneezed at. Similar dynamics applied elsewhere. I’ve heard historians suggest that the main return for the British from the Empire wasn’t economic — colonialism was not for the most part (India was an exception) particularly lucrative — but rather as a place to shed the lesser scions of the aristocracy, who might be destablizing, or at least unpleasant, if left to languish at home.

America doesn’t have colonies abroad, but the numerous make-work jobs at NGOs, nonprofits, and, to be honest, many government agencies, provide an income and a feeling of importance for people who have graduated from often-elite universities but whose real skill set probably qualifies them to run a spice shop in a mall. Holding those jobs lets them put on airs, feel superior to, and often boss around or lecture their fellow citizens who are often treated as inferiors.

In short, America has been colonized from within.

Well, nations that are colonized usually wind up tossing out the colonizers. And, often as not, that’s driven as much by resentment about being treated as inferiors as by real economic complaints.

Is that what’s happening here? We can hope so.

There may be another source of change. Palantir CEO Alex Karp caught a lot of flak for saying that AI would destroy the kind of jobs mentioned above — he noted that they’re disproportionately held by Democratic women — and that that would have a major effect on the balance of political power. Well, maybe.

To be fair, Karp was talking about economic power: “This technology disrupts humanities-trained — largely Democratic— voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, voters. . . . And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”

And, more importantly perhaps, less prestigious jobs, at least in their own minds.

I’ ve written before about these effects, and quoted Erik Hoffer: “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”

Women — and men — losing their jobs to AI may lose economic power, but in a democracy they don’t lose their votes. It’s likely that many, even most, will drift to other lines of work, or retire, or otherwise go fairly quietly. But many will be radicalized. And as I noted before, laid off coal miners were told to “learn to code” (terrible advice in the face of the AI revolution, it turns out!) but when upper-class college graduates lose their cushy jobs it gets, well, sympathetic tear-jerker pieces in the New York Times.

Hang on. It will be a bumpy transition even if, as I expect, it will be very good for the country in the end.