Notice That Your Boss Is More of An Asshole Than Ever? Here’s Why

Part of the genius behind NBC’s famous and now classic sitcom The Office was the character development that moved the audience to engage in an identity investigation of actor Steve Carell’s Michael Scott. As the head of Dunder Mifflin Scranton, Scott’s decisions in his love life, intra-office relations and even just plain business were often cringe-inducing. The viewer was left to determine how to characterize him. Was he just an inconsiderate, pretentious asshole? A fortunate incompetent or an idiot savant? A generally benevolent man who ought to garner our sympathy? In select, often unexpected moments, Scott proved to be an experienced if unique leader who carefully managed associates’ egos alongside company expenditures and ventures which included awards nights and even a rabies awareness fun run. He was a hilarious enigma.

One thing is for sure: Michael Scott’s antics did not bring financial ruin to his company. Whether purposefully or accidentally, Scott’s oddball initiatives tended to bring prosperity to his branch.

I have no idea how many good or bad bosses exist out there in the work world. I know nothing of the current ratio of effective bosses to asshole malevolents and ignoramuses. In point of fact, I do not much care to verify the following contention through unreliable surveys and stats. It is not a bold claim that, in terms of number and kind, there seem to be more of the assholes in leadership positions than ever before.

I should note that the men and women who I happen to define here as asshole bosses are not those who simply demand a great deal out of their employees. Au contraire, an asshole boss is one who feels a constant, unrelenting desire to cover up his own incompetence and ignorance with go-nowhere meetings, long pointless soliloquys, and reflexive moves to undermine the true human assets to a company. Asshole bosses gained their positions, after all, not by some convincing displays of their worth to the enterprise, for examples, by being the best paper salesman in the area or the warehouse manager who achieves a 100 percent shipment satisfaction rating. No, asshole bosses are failures and midwits as managers who nonetheless concurrently possess a genius for ingratiating themselves with the previous midwits who were their superiors. Stupidity loves company. They rightly identify the modern means of climbing the corporate ladder. They are experts at the game of self-survival and advancement yet morons at how to achieve the actual aims of their respective companies and enterprises.

So how do these asshole bosses survive and even thrive, especially in large companies, banks, hospitals and schools?

Of course, there is a sound economic explanation for this, and like all great deductions in economics, it emerges from the Austrian school.

In economist Saifedean Ammous’s The Bitcoin Standard, the author walks the reader through the inherent dangers of fiat currency. Its usage serves as the foundation of the boom and bust cycles to which, unfortunately, we have become all too accustomed. It is the fundamental tool by which governments engage in empire building, finance wars, pay for exorbitant social programs, and deceive inhabitants to consume in the short term; after all the clock is ticking loudly on Joe Biden in both political and life terms. No one from king to president, finance minister to Fed chair wants to be around when it all falls apart. Indeed, as economist Robert Murphy has stated time and time again, modern monetary theory is neither modern, monetary, or a theory in similar ways in which historians classically joke that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman or an empire. Harkening back to the days of that loose, German, federation for a moment then, manipulation of the currency in Spain from descendants of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V reached such egregious and criminal levels that Jesuit scholar and economist Juan de Mariana defended regicide. Yes, that was a time, long, long ago when Jesuits were actually Catholic and actually concerned about the plight of the poor especially when the state exercised its power to further impoverish them. It was in this spirit of radical civil disobedience, writes Eric Graf, that men like Thomas Jefferson advocated for the individualism and self-determination in the face of autocratic rule.

Thomas Jefferson had bosses, as did the Jesuits at Salamanca, and none of them were assholes like today because of run away debt and monetary policy. Few areas of life and work are immune to it. Economic sectors like the aforementioned–education, health care, finance–end up especially prone to it. Gone are the days of the Belle Epoque in which efficiency, creativity and industry were rewarded with hard money. Gold has a real cost, so to allocate it is to feel a real hit. Its costs cannot be extended out or written off. They cannot be socialized. The recipient of hard money, which maintains and even appreciates in value over time, grows rich based largely on what he does with that medium of exchange. He can place it under his proverbial mattress. He can invest it in companies equally unwilling to see such inherent value frittered away. He feels no compulsion toward inordinately risky ventures or financial mechanisms to beat inflation and to maintain his standard of living.

But, when states across the globe are in a race to print their way out of the economic disaster that many of them imposed upon their own populations, the COVid pandemic being a convenient excuse, entrepreneurs cannot operate with any degree of confidence to direct real value to develop market-demanded goods and services. With less entrepreneurship, as Mises emphasized, the government invades the void with Keynesian stimulus and easy cash, the cost of which is rarely if ever felt. Thus, asshole bosses are empowered not to seek the best employees or reward the productive contributors–the assholes are incentivized instead to maintain the status quo within their organizations. Government seems always to be there, “like the air that we breathe”, as one State Department apparatchik once declared to me, ready to bail out and resuscitate zombie enterprises. The doctor is no longer beholden to the patient. Dr. Fauci is no longer (if he ever was) beholden to the public. The teacher does not teach; she indoctrinates. The finance guy crosses his fingers and prays Jerome Powell keeps interest rates near zero. The greatest moral hazard, then, of fiat currency and easy money policy is the moral hazard of atrophy and apathy that comes to constitute the relationships between producer and consumer, service provider and recipient.

The Office featured humor that made light of work situations. The show’s writers actually made hysterical racial jokes which necessarily make the supposedly libertine leftists among us clutch their pearls. Perhaps they are riddled with intersectional shame for having laughed along just a decade ago? Only one character was openly gay, and none were transgendered. Oh the horror!

Thanks to the leftist takeover of the culture, comedy on TV might be dead. The takeover of asshole bosses need not be such a fait accompli. Here’s to hoping that civil disobedience comes in the form of burning or ignoring legal tender laws and that gold and Bitcoin become even more en vogue: We will have more Michael Scott’s and less assholes as a result.