Bureaucrat Benefits Twice Bankrupt City

This is a small symptom of a big problem. The type of jobs that were the mainstay of the middle class years ago--the kind where you work at the same company your whole life and earn your pension--vanished. The state attempted to pick up the slack by inventing jobs that looked like about the same thing to the worker, with one critical difference. They did not produce anything of value.

So rather than being an engine of economic prosperity, they were parasitic ticks, growing fatter every year. We are approaching the point at which the remaining jobs are dying from the parasites directly, rather than just competitive pressures. So there isn't enough actual work getting done to support the charade, and the state organization goes officially bankrupt. Never mind that it was insolvent from the day the critical factory left town, and never voluntarily accepted the pain from that loss.

People chase money around so much they forget that money is just a mathematical shortcut for trading goods and services. If you don't produce any, before long, you won't be able to get any from anyone else. The state's power to steal can keep up a shell game a lot longer than anyone else, but eventually it can run out of people to rob.