Apr
26
2026

I'm Not Sorry You Lost Your Bullshit Job

And You Shouldn't Be, Either.

The Blogfather, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, has taken to posting on his substack instead. You can partially read his latest without a paid subscription: Our Self-Colonized Nation. He illustrates his thesis with a viral tweet:

More telling graphics at the link. It's not just schools. Glenn:

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.

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Last year, I read a book by the late lefty-anarchist David Graeber, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…; I was not impressed, but I might have had better luck with his 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs. (Amazon link at your right.) I'm not sure if I want to expend a library pick on it, but maybe. A lesson I would hope it teaches: bullshit jobs are soul-draining. Do something better, if not more lucrative, with your life.

But that title came to mind when I read Glenn's musings on …

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.”

Unfortunately, that's where the article cuts off for non-subscribers.

Fun fact: If you didn't know, Penzeys Spices is a virulently GOP/Trump-hating enterprise. $19/hour is pretty good money if you lack skills that might make you more valuable to more generous employers.

Also of note:

  • What does a yellow light mean? You would hope a CDL applicant would know. But, believe it or not, it might be a partisan issue out in California! Jonathan Turley wonders: “Racial Profiling” or Race Baiting? Tom Steyer’s Illiterate Take on English Proficiency.

    If you go to NASCAR to watch the cars crash, the Democratic gubernatorial race in California has been a thrilling pile-up.

    The recent debate saw all the Democratic candidates play the race card over a curious issue. When asked if they supported the move to rescind at least 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, every single Democrat declared the policy racist. The candidates also pledged to support truckers who cannot speak or read English.

    When Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican candidate, said that being able to read English (and particularly English signs) should be mandatory, Porter lectured the Hispanic sheriff on racism, saying that his support for English proficiency by truckers disqualified him from being governor of California.

    Not to be outdone, Democratic candidate Tom Steyer declared that requiring truck drivers to be able to read English is “racial profiling.”

    To go with our lead item, truck driving is not a bullshit job. But you should read a recent print-Reason article about it: Is there a truck driver shortage in the U.S.? (Print edition headline: "Welfare on Wheels".)

  • They can't have an endless supply of Ayatollahs, can they? Kevin D. Williamson thinks There Is No Winning in Iran. (archive.today link) Kind of a downer!

    Donald Trump has many problems—moral, intellectual, possibly psychiatric—and one of them is that nobody apparently ever has gotten around to telling him that he is a … weak man, I will write, the truly appropriate Germanic vernacular being inappropriate to this forum. Trying to run a strongman foreign policy with a weak man at the center of it does not work. Trump has been begging—“like a dog,” as he would put it—the Iranians to back off the Strait of Hormuz and allow international shipping to return to normal. (It is not clear that it could return to normal.) Because Trump is a weak man surrounded by sycophants, you can be confident that when the Trump administration insists that there will be no “toll booth” by which Tehran can enrich itself thanks to its effective (effectively granted by the White House) sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, that such a financial mechanism is very likely what the administration ultimately is getting itself ready to swallow.

    KDW can imagine a best-case outcome, but remains pessimistic that Trump has the capacity to get us there.

  • Which brings us to… I recently decided to auto-feed myself past articles from the Pun Salad archive. I blogged this bit of wisdom from Brad DeLong twenty years ago today:

    Democrats are (because of the environmentalist wing of the party) generally in favor of higher gasoline taxes and higher gasoline prices--except when gasoline prices are high. Republicans are in favor of letting oil markets "work"--except when gasoline prices are high.

    True dat:


Last Modified 2026-04-26 9:36 AM EDT