We Never Got Socialism — We Got the Paperwork Empire and Bullshit Jobs — But We Can Still Fix It

I run a cleaning business. The work itself is honest and simple: a house is dirty, we make it clean, the owner can see the difference with their own eyes and decides for themselves whether it was worth the money. That transaction — value created, value recognized, value paid for — is the whole of what an economy actually is. Everything real rests on it.

Now sit with how much of my week has nothing to do with it.

The license. The bond. The renewals. The insurance riders written to satisfy requirements that never become a thing. The classifications, the filings, the forms that exist to prove I filled out other forms. None of it makes a single window cleaner. None of it is wealth. It is a tax paid in hours, and the hours come out of the only part of the day that was ever productive in the first place.

I used to think of this as friction — annoying, but marginal. I don't anymore. I think it's the main event. I think we have built, slowly and with the best of intentions, an entire civilization of activity that produces nothing, and then convinced ourselves the activity is the economy. And I think no president is going to save us from it, because every president for fifty years has either fed this thing or failed to starve it — and the ones who promised to starve it fed it anyway.

The diagnosis came from the left, which should tell you something

In 2018 an anthropologist named David Graeber published a book called Bullshit Jobs. His claim was blunt: a huge share of modern work is pointless, and the people doing it know it. The survey he pointed to found that roughly four in ten workers said their job made no meaningful contribution to the world. Not “hard.” Not “underpaid.” Meaningless. Performed, on some level, as theater.

Here's the part worth pausing on. Graeber was an anarchist and a man of the left — no friend of mine on most questions. And yet he saw the same rot I see from the other side of the aisle. That convergence is the tell. When a leftist anthropologist and a veteran running a small business in Oregon arrive at the same scene of the crime, the problem isn't “left” or “right.” The problem is the machine itself, and the way it manufactures work that exists only to manage the complexity it created.

This is why I want to be careful with a word. People like me reach for “socialism” to name what's gone wrong, and I understand the instinct — it feels like the size of the diagnosis. But it lets the actual culprits walk. The United States is not a socialist country by any serious measure; it remains one of the most market-driven economies on earth. Calling our disease socialism is like calling a tumor “indigestion.” It points at the wrong organ, and worse, it implies a partisan cure — just elect the other guys — when the disease has metastasized under every administration of both parties for half a century. The real enemy isn't a doctrine. It's an apparatus. Call it the administrative state, the compliance economy, the paperwork empire. Whatever you name it, it answers to no election, fears no voter, and has never once been made to shrink.

The receipts

You don't have to take my word for the scale. People have counted.

The Code of Federal Regulations — the standing body of federal rules — ran to 190,627 pages in 2023, filling 245 bound volumes. Laid end to end, a single year's worth runs more than twenty miles and contains roughly 104 million words. No human being has read it. No human being could; at a normal reading pace it would take over three years of full-time effort just to get through one year's edition.

The Mercatus Center counts something more precise than pages: “restrictions,” the actual command-words in the text — shall, must, may not, required, prohibited. In 1970 there were about 441,000 of them. By 2025 there were over 1.36 million. The number of binding federal commands on American life tripled in a single lifetime. And that's only the federal layer — every state stacks its own code on top, California alone piling on nearly 400,000 more.

This is not free, and it was never free. One pair of economists estimated that regulatory accumulation shaved about 0.8 percentage points off annual economic growth from the late 1970s onward — which compounds into something obscene. By that math, had we simply frozen the rulebook in 1980, the U.S. economy could have been on the order of $4 trillion larger by 2012. Trillions of dollars of houses not built, businesses never started, raises never given, dreams quietly strangled in the crib — not seized by a cartoon villain, just smothered, one form at a time, by people who went home every night believing they were the good guys.

And the people it crushes hardest aren't the wealthy. The research is consistent and ugly: heavier regulation tracks with higher poverty and higher consumer prices, and the poorest households spend the largest share of their income on exactly the heavily-regulated goods whose prices the rules push up. The compliance empire is sold as protection for the little guy. The little guy is the one bleeding to pay for it.

The closing table: a master class in extraction

You want to see the whole paperwork empire compressed into one afternoon? Sit at a real-estate closing.

A house changes hands. The thing of actual value — shelter, a place to raise kids, a yard to stand in — was built once, by people who poured the concrete and framed the walls and earned every dollar of it. Everything after that is supposed to be the simple act of moving that thing from one owner to the next. Instead, watch the salaries that get pulled out of a single transfer, and how little any of them add.

Start with title insurance — maybe the purest rent ever invented. You pay a premium, often half a percent to a full percent of the home's price, to insure against defects in the chain of ownership. Sounds reasonable, until you see what the industry actually pays back. In normal insurance — auto, homeowner's — roughly 70 to 80 cents of every premium dollar returns to customers as claims. In title insurance, the loss ratio sits near 5 percent. In 2022 the industry collected about $21 billion in premiums and paid out just $596 million in claims — meaning roughly 97 cents of every dollar you handed over went to something other than protecting you. The Urban Institute clocked that year's loss ratio close to 3 percent. The U.S. Treasury convened a roundtable on it. The regulators know. And it changes nothing — because by the numbers this is one of the least value-returning financial products in the entire economy, and you are required to buy it. That's not a service with a little inefficiency baked in. It's a tollbooth bolted onto the one transaction every family must make, manned by people charging you a slice of your house for a records search a machine can now run in a second.

Then the agents. A federal jury didn't mince words: it found the Realtors' commission structure to be an antitrust violation — fees held artificially high by a cartel-like rule that forced sellers to advertise a payout to the buyer's agent just to get listed. The trade group settled for $418 million and rewrote its rules in 2024. And here is the tell — the same tell as the regulatory pile. Even after losing in federal court, the commission barely moved. It dipped, then climbed right back; the national average still sits around 5.7 percent, essentially where it's parked for years. The Federal Reserve's own researchers note that decade after decade, even as technology gutted the agent's entire reason to exist — you can see every listing yourself now, the very thing they used to gatekeep — the commission will not fall. The middleman whose value already evaporated still collects as though it hadn't, and dares you to try closing without him.

And underneath all of it sits the reason none of it ever gets competed away: the buyer has no power, and the system was built that way on purpose. Economists even have a name for this precise market — reverse competition. You buy a house a handful of times in your life. You don't know what a title search should cost. You're handed a brick of documents at a table ringed with professionals. The loan won't close without the products. And the people steering you toward this title company or that insurer aren't working for you — they're paid the same no matter which one you pick. You are the only soul at that table who pays for everything and chooses almost nothing. Every other seat is being fed. Yours is being harvested.

That is the paperwork empire in a single room. Origination fees, the appraisal, the title company, the insurer, two agents, a parade of “processing” and “underwriting” charges — a procession of salaries drawn off a transaction most of them barely touch, justified by complexity, mandated by rule, and landing in full on the one person who showed up just wanting a home.

Why they can't let the price fall

Now the deeper question: why does the house cost what it costs — and why will no one in power let that number come down?

Part of the answer is something we already lived through, and should never be allowed to forget. Between early 2020 and 2022, the money supply — the M2 measure of dollars in the system — grew by about 41 percent in two years. Year-over-year growth hit nearly 27 percent in early 2021, a spike the St. Louis Fed notes blew clean past anything from the 2008 crisis or even the great inflations of the 1970s — by some accounts the largest surge since 1943. Roughly $6.3 trillion conjured into existence, around $4.8 trillion of it straight from the Federal Reserve. And mark who did it, because they will all try to make you forget: this was not one party. The first torrent came in 2020, the next in 2021 — across two administrations, signed by two presidents, cheered by both teams. The flood was bipartisan. And printed water always pools in the same low ground: asset prices. Stocks, and houses.

Then the inflation came — on schedule, about eighteen months behind the money, exactly as the old monetarist rule predicts — and it fell like a hammer on the wage earner while it puffed up the homeowner's paper wealth. Bread and rent and gas climbed; the number on the house climbed faster. One group got to “feel rich.” The other got locked out of the only ladder that ever built a middle class, and then lectured about avocado toast.

And here is the part that should put a fire in your chest. Faced with home prices floating on an ocean of money they printed, the move from the top has not been to let the air out gently. It has been to hold it up. To prop. The current message from the White House is explicit and on the record — drive values up, keep them up, don't you dare let them fall — because falling values make voters feel poorer right before an election, and an election is the only thing the machine has ever truly feared. Lower interest rates get waved around as the magic wand that keeps prices high while pretending to help buyers — except the inflation they just printed won't allow the cuts, so the promise is a lie the moment it leaves the podium.

This is the auto-pen presidency of economics: a signature on the bottom of a page, keeping the machine grinding, with no human being willing to actually decide to fix it. But you do not escape a reckoning by propping the thing that's overvalued. You only decide who eats the loss, and when. Prop it long enough and you don't prevent the crash — you guarantee that when it finally detonates, it lands on the people who bought at the very top, the young families who stretched everything to get in, while the early owners who “felt rich for the first time in their lives” already walked out with the cash. That is not policy. It is a transfer of ruin from the people who already cashed out onto the people who haven't bought yet — and they have the gall to wrap it in the flag and call it protecting the American Dream.

Why no president saves you

Here is the line that should end the fantasy that an election fixes this.

The Cato Institute recently ran the numbers on whether the most aggressively deregulatory president of our era actually shrank the apparatus. The answer: barely, and not durably. During his first term the CFR still grew — slowly, but it grew. And in the first year of his second term, by the restriction count, the rulebook grew again, up over one percent from his predecessor's final year. The most anti-regulation political brand in living memory, at the absolute peak of its power, could not make the pile go down. It could, at best, slow how fast it climbed.

Sit with that. The apparatus is not a policy. It's an ecology. It has its own metabolism. Every rule breeds a constituency that defends the rule — the compliance officers, the consultants, the in-house counsel, the credentialing bodies, the whole professional caste whose paychecks depend on the maze staying impassable. Politicians come and go in four-year flickers. The machine plays a fifty-year game, and it is undefeated. You cannot vote your way out of a structure that has learned to survive elections, because the people who staff it were never on any ballot you were handed.

And don't go looking to a dealmaker to dismantle it, either. The man currently in the office proves it twice over. Not only is the presidency downstream of the machine — the person holding it is, by trade and by temperament, a builder of leverage, a man whose entire career was wringing the better end of a deal out of whoever sat across the table with less power. Ask that nature to tear down an apparatus that runs on exactly that asymmetry — the strong side of the table taking from the weak side — and you've asked the fox to redesign the henhouse and trusted him to do it hungry. He has told us plainly he wants property values driven up and kept up. He is not the cure for the propping. He is the propping. And this is no partisan cheap shot: the other side printed the money right beside him, then christened the dependency it deepened “compassion.” Both hands feed the same machine. They always have.

There's also a deeper layer the page counts miss — what one analyst calls “regulatory dark matter”: the guidance documents, the memos, the bulletins, the agency “interpretations” that carry the force of law without ever facing a vote or even appearing in the official code. You can be ruled by a rule that was never written down anywhere you could find it, by an official you can never name, who will never answer for it. That is not socialism. That is something stranger, colder, and more modern: government by paperwork that no one signed and no one can repeal.

The line that actually divides us

So let me say the thing this whole essay has been circling, and say it without flinching. We do not need a new president. We need a new posture — accountability at every level, and a society that still remembers, in its bones, the difference between producing and extracting.

Because the real divide in this country was never left and right, and it was never even rich and poor. It is between people who create value that others freely choose to pay for — and people who have found a way to get paid without creating any. We have quietly inverted our own moral order, until the man who produces something real is the chump, and the man who has mastered the forms is the winner. That extraction wears a thousand uniforms. It's a welfare apparatus cruel enough to pay a parent more to stay out of the workforce than to step into it, then call the cage it built around them “help.” It's an administrative clerisy that has never shipped a product, healed a body, fixed a roof, or closed a sale, billing the people who do all four for the privilege of being permitted to. It's the lifetime functionary — untouchable, unmeasured, unfireable — drawing a check against an outcome no one will ever check, while the family that funds him counts pennies at the closing table.

Hear me clearly, because this is the hinge the whole thing turns on: none of these people are the enemy as people. Most are doing the rational thing inside a structure that rewards it — the same as the clerk we're about to get to. Contempt for the human being is cheap, and it is beneath us, and it is exactly what the machine wants from you, because a people busy hating each other never turns to look at the apparatus harvesting them all. Save your fire for the right target. The enemy is the structure, and the accountability vacuum that lets extraction keep masquerading as work. But understand this with equal clarity: a nation cannot run forever on more people extracting than producing. The arithmetic is patient and it is merciless and it does not care about anyone's good intentions. When the takers outnumber the makers, the makers eventually stop — or break — and then there is nothing left to take.

Which is why the fix was never going to be handed down from above by a savior in a red tie or a blue one. It comes from the only place it has ever come from in the history of this republic — a community of people who still do real work, deciding together to take the administrative power back into their own hands. That is not a slogan. It is a blueprint, and I have already drawn it.

The X-ray is here, and that's the only reason I have hope

So why am I, of all people, writing this on a site about artificial intelligence?

Because for the first time, we have a tool that can read the whole maze.

Most of the bullshit jobs Graeber named exist for one reason: to manage complexity human beings can no longer hold in their heads. The compliance officer exists because no founder can read 1.36 million restrictions. The consultant exists because the form is unreadable. The title examiner's whole empire stands on a records search an ordinary person was never equipped to run. The entire parasitic layer is, at bottom, a tax we pay because the rules outgrew human cognition decades ago — and the people who profit from it have spent every year since making sure they stayed that way.

AI doesn't have that limit. It can read all 104 million words. It can run the title search, parse the closing documents, flag the junk fee, and tell you in seconds which rules actually bind a man cleaning windows in Salem and which are pure theater. It is, in effect, the most thorough audit in history — of the whole rotten edifice at once — available for free. And the moment a machine can do the compliance instantly and for nothing, a brutal question becomes impossible to dodge: if the busywork can be automated to zero, was it ever work at all?

That's the X-ray. AI is about to make the meaninglessness visible — to show, line by line, exactly how much of the modern economy is motion without value. And that visibility cuts two ways, which is the real war of the next decade. In the hands of the apparatus, AI becomes the perfect enforcer: infinite, tireless, spitting out ten thousand new micro-rules a day, a paperwork empire that finally never sleeps and never dies. In the hands of the people, the same tool dissolves the maze — does the form, files the filing, drags the dark matter into daylight, and hands a hundred million stolen hours back to the people they were taken from.

Which one we get is not a technical question. It's a question of will.

What real work actually looks like

Tear down without a blueprint and all you've built is rubble. So let me be precise about the world that replaces the paperwork empire — and about a trap most people fall into the moment they try to describe it.

The trap is thinking the line runs between makers and middlemen — between people who physically build or fix a thing and people who push paper. It doesn't. A logistics coordinator never touches the cargo and still creates real value; a thousand shipments don't collide because she did her job, and people pay her gladly for it. Plenty of hands-on work is busywork, and plenty of pure coordination is the realest thing in the building. The line that actually matters is older and simpler: would anyone pay for this if they weren't forced to? My customer looks at a clean window and decides, with their own eyes, whether it was worth the money. That free, sighted yes is the only certificate of real work there is. The compliance layer never has to earn it, because its “customers” don't choose it and can't see what they got — the work is mandated, not chosen. Run every role through that one test and the maze sorts itself.

This is also why the administrative class gets reality so consistently wrong — and why “out of touch” isn't an insult but a structural fact. Friedrich Hayek saw it eighty years ago: the knowledge that actually runs an economy is local, particular, and tacit. The man on the roof knows things about that roof no regional office will ever hold. The administrator doesn't fail because he's lazy or stupid; he fails because he's ruling on a reality he structurally cannot reach, working from aggregate numbers that have had all the real information sanded out of them. You can't fix that by hiring a smarter administrator. The knowledge isn't in the center. It never was. It's out here, in the hands of the people doing the work — which is the whole reason sovereignty beats supervision, every time, in the end.

So when the instinct rises to say fire them all and let them go produce something — I understand it, and its aim is true. But notice the trap folded inside it. If some authority gets to decide which jobs are real and clear out the rest, you've just rebuilt the administrative class in a new uniform: a commissar of usefulness, the exact thing you were trying to kill. The honest mechanism was never a purge. It's disintermediation. You don't fire the middleman; you remove the gap he was standing in, and the role dissolves on its own. The internet already did this to the travel agent, the record store, the local broker — not by decree, but by closing the information gap that justified them. AI is the next wave of that same force, and a vastly larger one. Strip the mandates that manufacture the busywork, let the tools carry the load no one was ever freely paying for, and the parasitic roles lose their reason to exist without anyone having to stand in judgment over a single human being.

And that distinction is the entire moral game. The clerk keeping the broken process alive is not the enemy; he's a capable person trapped in a role the system invented. Contempt for him is cheap, and it's wrong. Contempt for the machine that wasted him is righteous — and the humane victory isn't throwing him out, it's freeing the structure so he can finally go do something his own conscience would gladly pay for. That isn't softness. It's the whole difference between a reconstruction and a purge.

The overhaul, and where the blueprint already lives

The structural moves fall right out of the test. Hard caps on the total volume of binding rules, so a new one can't be born until an old one dies. Sunset clauses on every regulation, so the rule has to justify its own survival instead of the citizen having to survive the rule. An end to law-by-guidance, so nothing carries the force of law unless someone you can vote out actually voted for it. And beneath all of it, the repair no statute can mandate: a people that stops mistaking motion for work and process for value.

None of that arrives from a president. The office is downstream of the machine now — the most aggressive deregulator of our era couldn't make the pile shrink, only slow how fast it grew. So this was never going to be handed down. It has to be built — and I've already mapped how to build it.

In The Machinery No God of Love Would Build, I laid the reconstruction out in full: sovereign tools you own instead of tools that own you, daylight as the one thing a self-serving system cannot survive, and a five-year arc that migrates administrative power off the machine and into the hands of the people — Illuminate, Equip, Engage, Shift, Sovereign. The paperwork empire is simply the fourth complex in that same bloodline. The military complex farms your fear. The psychiatric complex farms your distress. The family-court complex farms your conflict. The compliance complex farms your hours. One engine under all four: an industry that profits from a problem it has no reason to end, the condition and the cure sharing a single bloodstream — here, the rules and the people paid to navigate the rules, each one justifying the other in an embrace that never breaks.

And the answer to “fire the administrative class” is already sitting in that blueprint, in the year I named Shift — the year AI absorbs the administrative load the machine used to justify its own size, and the excuse “I just followed the process” finally expires. The role doesn't get purged. It gets obsoleted, and the human being inside it gets handed back to real work.

The second humans

So this is the call, and I'll sound it plain.

It is time for a new Minuteman — not one who grabs a musket, but one who keeps the right weapon loaded and ready: the tool that reads the maze, the petition that lands on the record, the daylight no functionary can survive. Ready at a minute's notice — not to tear the country down, but to administer it himself. It is time for a new Rosie the Riveter — ordinary hands on the homefront of a quieter war, building the thing the moment demands because no one else is coming to build it. We did it before, with steel and sweat and a rolled-up sleeve. We can do it again, with sovereignty and code and the same set jaw.

It is time, in other words, for the second humans to rise.

Not a lesser human, and God forbid a replaced one — a fuller one. The second human is the one who refused both traps at once: who would not be flattened into a cog by the machine, and would not be dissolved into it by worshiping it. The one who knows in the marrow the value of the human experience — bare feet on real ground, the faces of the people in the room, the Spirit that never arrived through a notification — and for that very reason knows exactly how to turn the machine against itself. You cannot be seduced by a tool when you already know the thing it was built to counterfeit. The second human picks up the apparatus's own weapon, turns it back on the apparatus, and uses infinite, dirt-cheap intelligence to do the one thing the apparatus invented it to prevent: set the human being free.

That is the swarm I'm calling for. Not a mob — a swarm of patriots who have learned to administer their own duty. Who file their own filings, read their own records, route their own petitions, and hold their own government to its own stated word — without waiting on a Big Brother or a Big Sister who was always going to hang them out to dry, because hanging you out to dry was the business model the whole time. That is the entire point of taking the administrative power back: you stop needing permission to be a citizen. You become again the thing the founders actually meant — a free person, governing your own affairs by your own hand, answerable to God and your neighbors and no clipboard in between.

The house is dirty. The work is honest. Everything else is theater — and the lights are already wired. We only have to find the will to turn them on, and then do the one thing the machine was never built to bless: close the laptop, and walk back out into the world where value was always real, and always ours.

The fight has a soundtrack. “Piece by Piece” — listen on Bandcamp — and every listen helps fund the platform I'm building to give small businesses a fighting chance. We do it the only way it's ever done: piece by piece, together.