Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” was all the rage when fascism and totalitarianism was on the rise in the 1920s–30s. It sounded good — people with pertinent knowledge and skills would occupy positions in logically designed organizations in which those qualities would be optimally employed.
In practice, the most common quality of scientifically managed firms was intense dissatisfaction among their workers. That’s mostly because, in reality, people’s family, political connections, and willingness to “play ball” with the powerful and wealthy overshadowed everything else when it came to filling positions. That’s why the purest expressions of scientific management — communist countries — failed and continue to fail so spectacularly on all metrics of popular well-being and welfare.
America’s founders recognized that human nature predisposed people to abuse power to serve their own interests, and designed checks and balances into our government to make such abuse difficult. In the 233 years since we ratified the Constitution, those interested in subverting it have made substantial progress.
In communist societies, people in power act to preserve their best interest and the interests those closest to them, which screws everybody else and gives rise to a bifurcated society of “haves” and “have-nots.” This happens every time socialism/communism is implemented — without exception. It ultimately led to the deaths of over 100 million people in the 20th century alone. We’re seeing the same trends in our country simply because power-holders here have surreptitiously implemented some of the defining characteristics of those collective societies.
The purest form of this in the West today is the U.S. federal government. The higher the position, the more its occupant got there as a result of enabling his superiors, benefactors, and family to siphon off as much as they could from the public till. This has been the case since World War 2, which was the event that precipitated the metastatic expansion of our federal bureaucracy. After all, who could resist or object to something that was part of the “war effort,” even if that something was completely outside the range of authority of the bureaucrat who thought it up? That’s how it was done then and how it’s still done today — just like the “temporary expedient” of employer tax withholding, which brings home the bacon and, therefore, has been with us ever since. Someone publicly unaccountable decides unilaterally what ought to be done and bakes it into a regulation, which puts the force of “law” behind it. Except that no legislature was involved, and therefore, the public interest was not a prominent concern.