As IF Times

Who doesn’t despise politicians? It’s a profession as ancient as the “oldest” one and the similarities are quite striking. They both claim to make your life better; they tell you things you want to hear; but in reality, they both cost you money and in many cases, you’re actually worse off.  In reality, the true purpose of both of their jobs is to get you to use them again.

Nothing has changed much in our lifetime except that the compensation for being in the political racket has vastly outpaced the compensation from the more pedestrian ‘oldest’ profession. In fact the ability to enrich themselves is quite a remarkable skill since politicians are able to parlay somewhat nominal salaries into improbable fortunes during their terms.  They all seem to have miraculous money management skills; at least personally.

In practice, politicians come and go, at least in so-called democracies. The premise is that if the citizens are not amused with the activities of the incumbents, they get tossed out at the next election; provided of course that they actually hold an election.

If only it were that simple.  What politicians leave behind, even as they leave the active theater of politics are often an enormous legacy of bureaucrats that continue to operate without controls.  People who populate bureaucracies are fully aware that once a trajectory has been initiated on a program, then it becomes almost impossible to stop, even with changing political faces.

Bureaucracies have become effectively a fifth column. While ostensibly created to facilitate the wishes of politicians, with time, they become their own arm of influence, not accountable to the electorate.  This reality was brought into stark focus recently with the revelations of the expenditures of USAID, an organization created to “spread American goodwill”. There’s more than enough discussion of disclosures involving their expenditures over the decades in previous articles and elsewhere, so no need to enumerate them here.

Bureaucracies are a social and economic malaise that infects all nations of course.  In the possibly future 51^st state of Canada, the growth of public sector employees between 2019 and 2023 grew by 13 percent; 3.6 times the growth in the private sector. These kinds of bureaucracies serve to make life difficult for those having to deal with them.  Think the motor vehicle licensing station on a super scale.

But the activities of another more dangerous bureaucracy has revealed itself recently and that is the European Union.  Some may be aware that originally this body was formed to look after the economic interests of the nations within the European Union.  The main purpose was to ensure economic activities passed smoothly between nations and to create internal rules for such.  How big need this body be?  Each nation sends a few reps and you get some accountants to work the numbers.  That would seem logical.  But in a recent interview with Viktor Orban, the president of Hungary, he revealed that the EU bureaucracy now numbers over 30,000 employees.  So for each of the 27 nations represented in the EU, that amounts to over 1100 bureaucrats per nation. As an aside, the number of employees estimated at another world bureaucracy, the UN, numbers over 133,000.

Well you may say, it’s Europe, they love their bureaucracies, their holidays and their social systems, so it’s no big deal.  Of course, we can accept that, since they can spend their money as they wish.

Of more sinister issue is that the EU have expanded their area of influence to dictating policies to their member states that have nothing to do with trade, or that  involves non-members such as Ukraine.  Suddenly, the unelected bureaucrats are now directing political and military policies as well. Thus, rather than permitting member nations to retain their own identity, they are all being forced to comply with edicts issued by the unelected tyrannical bureaucrats effectively removing nations’ constituents from decision making.  This was starkly demonstrated recently when they decided to suspend Hungary’s voting privileges for reasons of ‘solidarity’; ironically supposedly fighting for European democracy.  They have confused themselves with NATO.

Suddenly, an organization that was formed to police agricultural and marketing policies internally are now mandating military expenditures to fight the imminent existential threat of Russia! The EU, a trade organization, has been allowed to morph into a political entity not beholden to the wishes of their own member nations.

As we’ve observed here in the US, the taking back of power and influence from entrenched bureaucracy will not be easy. The structures took generations to build and they cannot be dismantled without severe pushback from entrenched interests. We’ve seen the image of Musk wielding a chainsaw to this monstrosity in the US to the horror of bureaucratic beneficiaries.  It would appear that a bit of horror is needed at the EU.

So, tipping at restaurants.  By now, everyone has been exposed to the modern zeitgeist on tipping at restaurants.  This is one of those social customs that has crept up on the populace without anyone realizing what happened.  All of a sudden, certain tipping amounts have achieved status as the new normal.  Throughout most of my life, a gratuity was always seen as a discretionary amount left at the table after a meal in a restaurant.  As bizarre as it may seem now, 5% was not unusual in the 70’s and those really big spenders would even leave the princely amount of 10%.

Today, the absolute minimum has crept up to 15% while many electronic pay devices give you the freedom to add 18, 20 or even 25% to the total bill if you happen to be on drugs.

It’s not as if we should do away with the idea of tipping; it represents a gracious way of showing approval for a conferred service. It’s the expectation of a gratuity that has gone wildly out of control.   As most people know, the culture of tipping is most rampant in Western nations, notably in the US and Canada.  In Europe, no such social expectations are demanded upon restaurant diners, although that is likely to change as American values get adopted worldwide.  In Japan, tipping is not expected and is in fact considered insulting to servers there.

Ironically, according to foodwoolf.com the practice of tipping had roots in the taverns of 17^th century England when aristocrats left a few coins for servers “to insure promptness”, hence TIP.  Apparently, it was less a gesture of largesse as it was a means to show off their wealth and class.  When this custom first came to the US, it was considered the ‘vilest of imported vices”. Nevertheless, Americans adopted this custom and to this day, gratuities are not only present at all restaurants; at some they are mandatory.  Thus, tipping has evolved from being a not so subtle bribe to becoming a not so subtle mandatory tax.  There is often no relation between the minimum acceptable tip and the service.

Today, tipping culture has spread to include virtually all service industries.  Besides your food server, you are expected to tip your barber, your manicurist, the doorman, the garbage people, the mailman, the golf caddy, the pizza delivery guy, the tour guide, the bellman,  the hotel maid, the lap dancer, the parking attendant, etc etc, etc.

Again, nothing wrong with a small consideration for services offered, but the expectations are wildly out of kilter.  As the attached image shows, the expectations are that the value of the gratuity is expected to be a function of the value of the food served.  This makes no sense at all since it takes just as much effort to place a plate of fries at a table as it does to place a plate of foie gras. It takes as much effort to pour from a pitcher of water as it does to pour from a bottle of Chateau Lafitte.  Yet we are pressured to pay a gratuity based on the value of the food product.

This makes as much sense as paying a tip amount based on the value of the car that you bring to a parking valet.  Should we pay a percentage of a KIA’s value versus the value of a Mercedes?  Of course there are those that sniff that if you’re not willing to pay the expected gratuity, then you should not be dining out.  In fact, this is likely to happen as costs escalate and people get discouraged from paying a significant excess over services received.  This is of course, the Marie Antoinette attitude and eventually, only the very well-heeled will be able to afford to dine out.

It’s going to be tough to put the genie back in the bottle as they say, but at some point the threshold of resistance will be reached.  Once you get to the 25 to 30% level on gratuities, the food had better be damned good.