At what point do we revolt against this level of money laundering, incompetency, and fraud?

No, really. NYC spent almost 400 grand on TWO drinking fountains.

From John Schochet, a lawyer writing for WaPo:

Last year, I was appointed to Manhattan Community Board 7, which serves the city's Upper West Side. At a parks and environment committee meeting in October, a project manager from the parks department presented 23 slides about plans to replace two drinking fountains in Riverside Park. The presentation covered flood zones, tree roots, backflow prevention and a new water line. The budget? $375,000.

Absolutely idiotic.

Schochet says he couldn't imagine how two simple drinking fountains "could cost more than a four-bedroom house in a Kansas City suburb."

I can, but that's because I've seen how deep the rot goes!

Each requirement for the drinking fountain project has its own logic. Backflow prevention protects the water supply. Parks directives require replacing older water service pipes when making new connections. Since the parks department chose to rebuild one of the fountains exactly where an old one stood and has no records of where the original line ran, the city will need to dig a new trench. Digging the trench means doing a tree root survey. Procurement rules are intended to prevent corruption. The project manager presenting the slides was professional and thorough, checking every box. All of this led to the nearly $400,000 price tag.

None of this bureaucracy is sustainable. We can't live like this. Our roads and infrastructure are crumbling. Everything is getting more expensive by the day. We don't build things anymore.

But we have to make sure that we do proper tree root surveys, project presentations, and park directives! How ever could we survive without this kind of administrative oversight??

The dynamic that makes two fountains cost $375,000 scales. Individually reasonable requirements add up to unreasonable outcomes. This is why a mile of new subway in New York City costs $2.5 billion, roughly 8 to 12 times what comparable projects cost in Spain and Italy. It is why President Joe Biden's $7.5 billion federal program to build electric vehicle chargers, passed in 2021, had produced only 57 operational stations across 15 states by the time he left office.

You didn't come here to read all of Schochet's op-ed, but I'll leave you with his solution:

The mainstream center-left — liberals, centrist wonks, heterodox independents — needs to be better at getting mad.

Schochet, himself a liberal who helped work on Seattle's new $15-minimum wage, says red states (and I assume conservative writers at Not the Bee) are driven by populist rage that keeps them perpetually mad without offering solutions. This is where he drives off the rails, considering that red states have managed to reduce crime, save babies, lower cost of living, and attract capital to their states in recent years due to coordinated "populist" efforts.

But then he goes on to say moderate liberals can fix the same big government that moderate liberals have voted for over the last century? And the thing they need to do in order to affect this change is to get even more mad?? 🥴

He also says the system is just a big mess of good intentions put forward by good-meaning people. 👇

It's a self-perpetuating system, built over decades by well-meaning people making individually rational decisions that added up to something no one would build on purpose.

Is it though?

The purpose of a system is what it does. A veritable cornucopia of people get very wealthy and very powerful off the current system. These bureaucrats and their contract/NGO pals are making stealing a ton of money from taxpayers for projects like these water fountains. Trillions of dollars are at stake.

Consider Gavin Newsom's diaper scheme in California:

Newsom could simply give tax money (though this is still a form of Marxist wealth distribution) to parents to buy diapers from approved vendors.

Instead, Newsom is paying a third party NGO to do the work, which is blowing out the cost of the diapers. In fact, California could buy three times as many diapers if it simply didn't use its NGO middleman.

This is why the shutdown of USAID was so catastrophic to a great many people who leech off taxpayer money. Humans are incentive-driven creatures, and sinful/self-seeking ones at that.

The purpose of a system is what it does, and our current system is purposely set up to allow this:

Alarm bells were sounded about the Somali community in Minnesota over a decade ago. No one in power did anything about it despite local news reports and police investigators who were warning about the problem.

Because the purpose of a system is what it does.

Schochet is ignoring the fact that for well over half a century, the far-left has been actively engaged in "decolonizing" the West, which means the total overhaul of its founding documents (removing the Bible, replacing the Constitution with civil rights laws), its founders (painting Jefferson and Washington as racists, tearing down Columbus statues), its institutions (implementing DEI and ESG metrics at top levels of bureaucracy, corporations, and academia), and its people (mass migration).

This is the expressed goal of the Left. The institutions founded by Marxist sympathizers like FDR are hungry beasts that must have more blood and treasure to grease their wheels. They were founded explicitly with left-wing ideology at their core. Think of Social Security. Instead of letting a man invest in the stock market and make 10x his return, he'll get a fraction of that by forcibly paying money to the government so it can use his money interest-free and give him a pittance in retirement.

The problem is not that the Machine, as Schochet calls it, is well-meaning but needs to be streamlined. That is true for any bureaucracy.

The problem is that the Machine was designed to destroy America, and the only way you can solve the problem is by destroying the Machine.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.