In the very heart of the empire, under the very feet of the civil service that enforces the Cathedral’s will, lies decay and ruin due to ideology.

The D.C. Metro is threatening to shut down whole lines for months and possibly a year. This is the mass transit system built in the mid-20th century “ugly government building” aesthetic, whisking noble federal workers to and from the federal nerve center.

The Metro’s infrastructure has not been properly maintained. Maintenance is incredibly important, but the Metro employees have engaged in what is called check-mark paper inspections. Money is required for maintenance, and maintenance is a normal part of running any firm with physical capital and machinery. Where is the money going? Wages, health care, and inefficient outlays to keep city employees happy. D.C. is not alone. All metro areas have seen expenses rise. The MBTA system in the Boston metropolitan area received wonderful press protection when the Boston Globe stated the budget increased only 44% over the last 8 years. This is an era of cost-cutting on the private side, which never ever is suggested for the public sector.

Similar to other public budget issues, this is primarily a problem of public employee unions. Collective bargaining was a bedrock of the progressive economic platform, and even if progressives waffle on it today, public employee unions are a key to their Jenga-styled election coalition. The Wagner Act of 1935 did not apply to state governments. The progressive saint himself, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was against the idea of public sector unions. He spoke out against them due to the unique situation of public goods and services.

Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied.

This all changed starting in the ’50s, as governors and mayors allowed public employees to unionize. President Kennedy issued an executive order that allowed federal employees to unionize. Even conservative saint President Reagan was governor as California’s public employees unionized, sinking the state’s finances today. Unions allowed for a concentration of power into the union representatives and lawyers trained at Ivy League universities. The dues became pools of money for funding campaigns. This created an organized interest to use in elections. Unions also allowed progressives to break up the old city machines for vote manufacturing.

Tucked away within the story of budget bloat and maintenance decline is the peculiar problem of employee incompetence. Foreshadowing the future of American infrastructure if present trends continue, all of that employee money was going to departments turned into fiefdoms of ethnocentric employment practices. The Metro became a source of easy money for little work, and despite the changing dynamics of the city’s population, the Metro workforce maintained DC’s previous appellation of “Chocolate City.”

In 2012, The Washington Times covered the problems of the Metro. It focused on the culture of complacence, incompetence, and lack of diversity. Now this is not the common lack of diversity, which in liberal parlance means “not enough black people”. This report discussed the black ethnocentric hiring practices that put the Metro in the position that it finds itself today four years after the article. The ethnocentric hiring practices might have reached a nadir with one reported anecdote:

It is a culture in which a white male engineer near completion of a Ph.D. was passed over for a management position in favor of a black man who was barely literate, multiple staffers said.

Those hiring practices are how trains derail and the empire’s capital closes down entire rail lines. How black is the Metro? In the 2012 article, it reports that the Metro has 1.4% Hispanic bus drivers and train operators and 1.5% who are white. Washington DC is nearly 40% white and 10% Hispanic. Those kind of imbalances would be front page in The New York Times, were the situation reversed.

To clean the Augean stables of the Metro employment would require powers of a dictator. This has been tried in Michigan because of corrupt and dysfunctional city governments. The Flint water crisis, perpetrated by an evil white governor, is the national media crisis that is reported. Few stop to consider the majority black city council and black mayor’s role. Imagine a competent firing black employees en masse. The media would go into hysterics. Even Michelle Rhee’s Asian-American status could not prevent her being run out of her job as superintendent of D.C. schools, due to controversial policies than ran opposite to certain constituents’ desires.

The media will protect the public transit systems since they want expansions to those programs. The media even has some random thinkers who want to downplay this and say the Metro is not useful. Markets will fix it! The market will provide a solution right on top of the sunk cost ruin of the old solution. The solutions out there are beyond the pale and unmentionable. Private management? Destroying ethnocentric hiring practices by non-whites? Reforming employee pensions? No, no, no, just open up that wallet wider.

The ruling ideology will not place function over form.