Taking the Money

Coming to Terms with Dishonest Wealth

In the classic essay “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” (hat tip to Spaceman Spiff and Tom Pauken for the recommendation), Tom Wolfe discusses in hilarious detail the strategies used by inner-city blacks to receive funding for “community projects” in the early 1970’s. It usually involved a young hoodlum waltzing into the government office with a large posse designed to intimidate the sad sack designated to catch all the flak, hence the moniker flak-catcher. Through their tough demeanor, they aimed to prove to the pencil-pushers that they were the toughest group in town, and therefore leaders of the community. Sometimes this would involve coming in with weapons they “recovered” from the local gangs, likely from their personal stash. Other times it was filling the room with mean young men, mau-mauing until the office workers wanted to curl into a fetal position.

These bureaucrats were totally oblivious to how things operated in poor black neighborhoods. They originally enlisted the help of the middle-class blacks only to find out the common resident, far from seeing such an employed man in a nice suit as a leader, thought him a sucker. Given none of the mostly white administration had a clue how to find the actual leadership, they supplied grants and “community organizer” jobs to the clans who looked the most thuggish and could generate the most impressive display of power.

It was all kayfabe, as the blacks knew the chest-beating and veiled threats were part of the game. Tom Wolfe goes to show that, contrary to such shenanigans being clear corruption of a well-intentioned system, the system needed things to run that way.

And how could they find out the identity of these leaders of the people? Simple. In their righteous wrath they would rise up and confront you. It was a beautiful piece of circular reasoning. The real leaders of the ghetto will rise up and confront you… therefore when somebody rises up in the ghetto and confronts you, then you know he’s a leader of the people, So the poverty program not only encouraged mau-mauing, it practically demanded it. Subconsciously, for administrators in the poverty establishment, public and private, confrontations became a ritual.

-Tom Wolfe

They wanted to send grant money to those who would ostensibly use it for job training but more often would use it to lobby for even more funding. If one takes a “the system is what it does” rule of thumb, the entire inner-city welfare bureaucracy exists to expand the bureaucracy. Some ghetto thugs getting rich by treating whites as suckers was a secondary effect. No one’s life prospects in the projects improved. Often it made things worse, ‌requiring even more money.

When dealing with an ossified bureaucracy, especially one where the majority care not one whit for their job’s intended mission or are stuck in a fantasy realm unrelated to their supposed mission, it’s often much more important to understand how to play the system than having legitimate grievances. This goes for the government as much as the private sector, especially parts of the private sector that are deeply entwined with government, such as insurance, defense, and workplace regulations. There are countless unwritten rules to follow for those “in the know” that will not be in any process manual. They know the winks and nudges, the magic words and hidden channels that can get your claim approved.

A recent experience with this came when our neighborhood got hit with a hailstorm. Nothing serious as I gave a cursory inspection of the roof and saw only a couple dents. Our roof was twenty years old too, so they were largely unnoticeable. It was holding up well but had portions clearly deteriorating, so we began saving for its replacement.

A man from a roofing company knocked on the door, explaining that he saw some damage on the roof and asked permission to work with the insurance company to pay for it, while employing him for all work involved of course. He just finished with the house across the block where most of the roof replacement was paid for and felt confident he could do the same for us. I thought it was a waste of time, as I assumed such minimal damage to an ancient roof would qualify, but told him to go for it. Soon enough the gears were in motion as he called an adjuster to climb up there as I oversaw the inspection.

I thought the relationship between the roofing company’s operation and insurance adjuster would be more combative. After all, the roofer’s play was to gin up damages because of personal interest. In reality, the two men chatted about recent movies their kids watched, how work was going, and other tangential topics. These two knew each other well. They almost seemed like buds. The roofer showed the sparse damage, I’m assuming using all the correct buzz-phrases and rhetoric to make it acceptable. The two finished their work, shook hands, and the adjuster set off to write a quote.

Two days later, a full roof replacement was approved.

Merit is in the eye of the beholder

To be clear, I think the relationship between the two was ethically sketchy, but I don’t believe illegalities like kickbacks were involved. The roofer simply knew the proper channels to make an approval quick and easy, and greasing these skids made a rubber stamp the easiest option. The adjuster even admitted that the damage technically did not warrant a full replacement but approved it because we showed no signs of intentionally damaging the roof to defraud the company. He was willing to work with people who weren’t bad actors.

If I attempted this, the assessment would have likely gone far differently. I probably would have gotten a pittance for the repair along with an annoyed adjuster who felt I wasted his time. I didn’t know the right channels, the right things to say, the correct nomenclature that eased life and limited paperwork.

It felt like cheating. Everyone has been taught the value of fairness and objectivity, that the system will treat everyone by the same standards. This is never the case, especially when dealing with the mass scale of modern living. Navigating a bureaucracy of deracinated drones is far more important than the objective criteria of your case. This doesn’t mean you should defraud or be dishonest, but it does mean getting what you want necessitates working with things as they are, not as they should be.

Still, everyone knows the guy at work who knows how to game office politics to get him either a phony baloney no-work job or work his way up the ladder to an unqualified position. While this is universally seen as bad faith and immoral, there’s the far grayer area of those who are unexceptional, but competent, who know how to be in the right places and talk to the right people. They always have a leg up against the brilliant but less savvy man solely focused on the work in front of him. There’s the family unafraid to debate and challenge the insurance companies, infinitely patient as they navigate through the process to get their intervention paid for, versus those who arguably have a stronger case but get shut down early and stop trying.

While there is grayness, the moral corrosiveness manifesting when pushing too hard for something you know you don’t deserve is real. YouTube is inundated with videos explaining how to qualify for disability, with several streamers that are clearly able-bodied bragging about getting 100% disability from the military. When these people know how to scam the system while countless veterans deal with constant abuse through the VA system, it makes one’s blood boil. On a mass scale, this leads to a low-trust bust-out culture where honor and civics get thrown off the table in favor of getting your piece. On a long enough scale, it leads to deeply cynical people and a collapse of social trust.

Just like the public works projects in ghetto neighborhoods, the system has to work this way. After all, you’re just a nameless number in the system. They know nothing of your moral fortitude, nor of your life story. They see someone who either can justify himself the right way, creating the least work, and those who are a hassle. Those who know the right strings to pull, the right shortcuts to request to make things smooth, and those who don’t. Applicants whose plight requires the gear to move in ways they’re not designed, a corner case tripping the smooth and monotonous machine, will be met with frustration and animosity. In an ideal world these would be personal relationships, but that can’t scale to the organizational behemoths we have today. When trying to navigate what is just and unjust, is it really a victory to take the moral high ground as you get undeservedly denied because playing the game was beneath you?

Outside the roofing incident, this has also come into full view in the last year as my family has learned how colleagues have been working the system to get a piece of the pie, putting us under their wing. Right now, my kids are technically public-school students. My wife is technically a public-school teacher. We also homeschool. This might seem like a contradiction, but through the miracle the bureaucracy, both can be true.

Our state has several virtual schools for students to attend school online. Some are fully web-based, while some have options for in-person classes to supplement the online work. Different organizations can be paid to offer these one-day-a-week classes to students in the area using their own teaching staff. One of the local churches with a huge number of homeschooling parishioners got an idea. Why not offer classes through this virtual school? The teachers get paid, the students get a plethora of free resources, and it would be a nice extension to build community. Soon enough, three hundred kids were enrolled, with the local church offering everything from kindergarten spelling to calculus classes.

There are some caveats to navigate. It had to be secular, and some work had to be done online. The secular portion removed some classes from consideration, but most of math, science, reading, and writing was still doable. The online portion they created for these classes is, to be frank, somewhat of a joke. It usually involved reading a brief passage and answering two questions, following the letter of the agreement but not the spirit. The real meat is in the papers turned in while in class.

Through this system we have gotten basic classes, but also more exotic options. Through a partnership with other companies, we got swim lessons, with the next year being fitted with horseback riding and possibly even ballet being covered in the program. My wife teaches for a solid hourly wage, and homeschool kids get an excellent introduction to the arts. Everyone wins.

Are we cheating the system? While teachers in your typical public school might think so, not so with the virtual academy administrators. They see dollar signs. While working within the confines of the charter designated by the state, they have gotten access to financing hundreds of students, not to mention increasing staffing to oversee the operation. The line graph that shows increasing numbers of students and therefore guarantees their longevity. As long as we follow the rules plausibly, everyone wins. Of course this costs money but given I am saving the local schools literally hundreds of thousands of dollars by educating my own kids, while my property taxes still go for funding them, I don’t feel bad. Others might have a different opinion.

This took another strange turn last week when I received letters from the State of Michigan addressed to my three school-aged children. Opening them up, I saw an EBT card.

We are far from filthy rich, but also far from the poverty line. Apparently, it was a summer food program for children, giving a stipend for the three months school lunches are not available. School breakfasts and lunches for poor children is another classic case of scope creep. Why are schools involved in this? Shouldn’t this be handled by someone else? The reason, of course, is that where there’s money to be managed, the bureaucracy will find a way. Ridiculousness aside, I called the state, assuming it was a mistake. I mentioned the kids were in school, but it was a virtual school, and we were far from poor. The amiable lady on the other side seemed flabbergasted we called to tell her all this. She looked at our records and saw that the school automatically enrolled everybody and the card was legit and legal to use. She said in a soft, matter-of-fact tone, “I mean, take the money.”

I have extended family who live comfortably, if incredibly frugally, getting surprised by their eligibility, and they took it. What’s shocking is this was pushed on us when we never requested it. I also don’t see it as an altruistic gesture, since it seems to be a stunt by our state government to build political support, and nothing creates rapport like easy money.

Regarding Personal Corruption

This leads to the most dangerous aspect of bust-out culture. Those who sign those checks get leverage. If the virtual academy suddenly mandated we had to give pro-gay propaganda, would that Church have the gumption to walk away? There’s a tightrope one has to traverse to avoid becoming beholden to bureaucrats who have their own ambitions and motivations. While the virtual academy, for now, is only interested in getting their numbers and funding to grow, it will be a different story if an ideologue takes over and you’re trapped between leaving and likely closing the school or selling your soul to mammon.

There is a strange symbiosis in place too. While the bureaucrats could be total ideologues, their jobs still depend on clientele. If they had no one to give EBT cards to, the welfare office would cease to exist. If the virtual school had no students, it would close. There’s also the political aspect of terrible publicity and legislators who want to reel in organizations that go rogue. Just like those offices handed out money to the hoodlums that treated them like chumps, likely despising them back, they needed each other.

Older generations get mocked for their bootstrap ideology and independent streak that refuse handouts out of principle, but they had a point. Dependency breeds more dependency, and once someone has their claws in you it’s hard to dislodge them. In the earlier days of high-trust and ample opportunities for personal relationships and networking with local businessmen who know you and have your back, this made sense. You could receive help from people who knew you without depending on strangers.

As technology has brought about the dominion of the mega-corporation by swallowing up smaller entities while private equity eviscerated local businesses, the idea of a personal relationship built upon mutual trust has been eliminated in favor of spreadsheet efficiency. Much of the time you’ll never interact with a human being, and this will only get worse with the proliferation of chatbots. Everyone has heard horror stories of social media closing out accounts, wiping out years of work with no recourse. Everyone has worked with the byzantine structure of insurance companies which demand everything be digital. While this increasingly automated and impersonal system would seem to favor the bureaucracies, it will just lead to new ways to game the process, getting approvals without a human in the loop.

Being a leech isn’t virtuous, but neither is being a sucker. As low-trust consumes society and everyone aims for a piece of the pie, those who don’t know how to work this new world to their advantage will be milked by those who do, essentially funding their own demise. As taxes and regulations become more onerous and bewildering and hegemonic corporations rule over daily life more and more, there’s no more logic in grandstanding about refusing handouts. Getting your due from The Man is no longer relegated to poverty-stricken street ghettos. You can keep your virtue, your dignity, and your independence when you play your cards right, and the more you gain for projects important to you, the less there is to fund your enemies.

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