“The people in charge don’t want to get fired more, so than they’re looking to do something great, so they want to kind of follow a set of rules that somehow get set in stone, that don’t really translate,” Vaughn said, referring to movie studio execs.
He added, “But as long as they follow them, they’re not going to lose their job because they can say, ’Well, look, I made a movie off the board game ‘Payday,’ so even though the movie didn’t work, you can’t let me go, right?’” – Vince Vaughn, via the New York Post, explaining why “R”-rated movies are on life support.
I don’t really pay much attention to Hollywood, but scrolling through my X feed this morning I came across this interview Vaughn did with the YouTube Show “Hot Ones” and it struck a chord with me. I spent almost 5 years as chief of staff to Phoenix Councilman Sal DiCiccio, and what Vaughn described is exactly the same mindset that dominates government bureaucracy. Promotion and careerism in government now comes down to one thing: following a path someone else has blazed. Success or failure is irrelevant to the career prospects of government employees, as long as they don’t fail trying something now. It doesn’t matter if the path is a rocky road to disaster, as it is with the government approach to homelessness, following the path is all that matters.
Government bureaucrats who never stray from the path and never innovate get promoted steadily up the ladder. Bureaucrats who take chances, who try new approaches, or even just question existing systems put their career at risk. Sure, bureaucrats who innovate might succeed, and if they do their career prospects won’t be harmed (though they won’t be helped much, either), but experimental failure is a sure path to career ruin. Almost no one will risk that when robotic adherence to existing systems guarantees career success. Do nothing creative, keep your head down, and 30 years later you’ll end up (at least) a Deputy Assistant Department Director with a $400,000 a year salary and $320,000 a year pension. See a problem with those systems, be creative in approaching solutions, and there’s a very good chance you end up as a $60,000 per year realtor with a 401K. That’s not a risk many bureaucrats will take.
Hollywood, on the other hand, has long had a reputation for living on the edge: taking chances and rolling the dice. Many of the greatest movies and shows in history were enormous gambles that almost never got made. That even our country’s greatest bastion of creativity has now fallen to the bureaucratic mindset is a giant warning signal. Government once rewarded daring and achievement much like the Hollywood of yesteryear. The result was the construction of the world’s greatest society, built on a backbone of breathtaking national infrastructure. The Hoover Dam was built in less than four years. The entire national highway system, almost 4,000 miles initially, in less than a decade. Now it takes us 10 years to replace a bridge. The utter incompetence of government in the age of bureaucratic excess should be a warning, not a model. Yet, somehow, we’re rapidly re-creating commerce and society in the image of our flailing, failing bureaucracy.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Sam Stone only and not his co-host Chuck Warren or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.
