Firing the Locksmith

Firing the Yosemite locksmith raises the question of just how many other locksmiths exist across the whole of the US federal government.

When members of society are offered a life of sedentarism paid for by others, one should not be surprised that many will accept such an offer, and while it seems a paradox, the very people who possess the least energy for industry of their own, will expend extraordinary amounts of effort to maintain the support that allows them to exist without producing any value whatsoever.

And I am not singling out the poor and destitute. I am talking about a managerial class whose work is simply to work for the sake of working, avoiding the creation of any obvious value except for the maintenance and continuation of the status quo.

An example of this is the angst surrounding the firing of the Lord Nate Vince, Keeper of the Keys, the Grand Master Locksmith of Yosemite. According to Lord Nate, he had held this position for forty-eight months and apprenticed for four years at the knee of the previous Grand Master Locksmith, who held the position for 23 years and told Nate, "This is a good job Nate, the park can’t run without a locksmith, do your job well and you’ll always have this job.”

Is there any other situation that more encompasses the resistance to modernizing or that nobody recognized a need to change this process until it rested on a single person?

I certainly don't know how much locksmithing goes on in Yosemite. I agree with Nate who tweeted, “The people that fired me don’t know who I am, or what I do. They simply don’t understand this park and how big and complex it is.” - but what I do know is there are commercial solutions available to track and secure capital equipment as well as to maintain the security of far-flung buildings without the need of a locksmith.

How many hotels do you know that still use physical keys?

Maybe the low-tech variant works for Yosemite, but even if it does and it is such an important job, why was there only one person who knew how to do the job?

One wonders how many other similar situations exist - because we know there are computer systems still working on floppy discs. In January, an article with the title: Driving blind: NYC subways steered by 1930s tech, paper maps and a lot of hope, was posted in The Gothamist, an online news outlet run by New York’s public radio station, WNYC. I could be wrong, but I’m going to bet there are systems at the Treasury or the IRS that rely on one or two people to keep them going.

At first, I assumed this was a unique situation until I realized this was our government we are talking about, they one that is funding insane things at home and abroad and nobody was asking questions about them - and apparently the Democrats now want to make it illegal to ask them.

I've quoted this passage from Hayek before, but it is certainly always applicable to how our government, and the management of it, has evolved (devolved, perhaps?):

"It is not difficult to deprive the seat majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced. Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken support of the regime. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb report of the position in every Russian enterprise: 'Whilst the work is in progress, any public expression of doubt that the plan will be successful is an act of disloyalty and even of treachery because of its possible effect on the will and efforts of the rest of the staff.'"

DOGE is the best chance we have ever had to fix all of this.