Perhaps the greatest incompetence on the U.S. political scene is in the military, which spent $9 trillion in the Afghanistan war on terror over a period of 20 years and failed miserably to train the Afghan military to defend its territory.

To date, no military officers in charge of this colossal failure have been fired or demoted, while many private contractors and the military industrial complex laughed all the way to the bank, making exorbitant profits off the Afghanistan campaign while it lasted.

Next is an excerpt from americanthinker.com by Olivia Murray of 3/9/23.

Now, House Republicans are poking around. Three days ago, Rep. James Comer and Rep. Pete Sessions sent a letter to the DoD's Lloyd Austin regarding the messy finances. Read below:

The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating the Department of Defense's (DOD) failure to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. In November 2022, DOD failed its fifth consecutive audit, unable to account for sixty-one percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) also recently reported that DOD continues to fail to accurately account for hundreds of billions of dollars of government furnished property in the hands of contractors. DOD's inability to adequately track assets risks our military readiness and represents a flagrant disregard for taxpayer funds, even as it receives nearly a trillion dollars annually. 

It's a tossup whether this is gross incompetence or outright defrauding of government funds.

Perhaps the most pressing problem this nation faces is the incompetence of the Department of Education.  Despite the illusory claim that the United States has the best educational system in the world, it ranks 38th in math scores and 24th in science scores in the world.  In an age of technology, this is a terrible statistic, which threatens to make the United States a third-world nation in the long run.

Despite the growing evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic had a negligible effect on children, school lockdowns and mandatory face mask usage in schools continued beyond necessity and resulted in the average student learning loss to be 10 months — 16 months for non-white children.  Worse yet was the disclosure that Critical Race Theory was being taught, which emphasizes color and not character and competence as being of primary importance in education.  What this really shows is that national education policy is a colossal failure, and educational decisions should be relegated to local institutions of learning, where parents should have an active say in where and what their children learn.  School choice at the local level should be paramount.

There is a more fundamental flaw in our educational system, and it is promoting students based on age and not achievement and teaching to class sizes greater than 25.  Large class sizes means that slow, medium, and fast learners are pooled together.  Teaching to the average student means that slow learners learn very little, and fast learners get bored out of their skulls.

The savior (I think) from this frustrating archaic teaching situation is to rapidly switch to individualized interactive audio-visual computer education in the classroom or at home, where a student can learn at his own pace and demonstrate achievement level accomplishments no matter what his age.  With this format, it is not inconceivable that many students will be graduating high school much earlier than the age of about 18 and will be able to enter the workforce.

Not only is higher education getting prohibitively expensive, but much of it is a waste of time, where roughly 50% of graduating students are unemployed yet not able to find any work at a job other than at minimum wage.  To say our educational system is in crisis mode is probably an understatement, all due to an incompetent system of education.

Modern medicine historically has made serious advancements in longevity and in the curing of previously incurable diseases.  Some of these serious advancements are still going on today.  However, it seems to me that our regulated medical system is quite incompetent, too.

Individual incompetence by Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., as the director and bureaucrat of the government agency known as NIAID, who is somewhat responsible for making the pandemic worse than it had to be, is finally coming to light.  The most egregious claim was that the COVID vaccine with additional booster shots would prevent recipients from getting COVID at all, which proved to be false.  The important role that natural immunity plays in COVID resistance was totally ignored in schoolchildren and young adults.  The incompetence of the government's FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) was also a major contributor to the pandemic fiasco.

But although there is much to criticize in Big Pharma, public health is all about incompetence rewarded.  In public health, the most incompetent group of individuals are the money-grubbing politicians who claim to be legislating for the common American but who are in fact legislating to further promote big money and especially big international banks and corporations, much to the detriment of the nation as a whole.  It is a general truism that bigness promotes incompetence and corruption in big military, big education, big medicine, big agriculture and food, and big government in general.

The only hope of surviving this civilizational decline in government is a return to emphasizing individual moral or ethical and achievement excellence and promoting many small family businesses with no taxation so they can compete with the overgrown big money-grabbing business dinosaurs aligned with the government, which are populating the world and will undeniably eventually go extinct if they don't evolve to a more manageable size.

From a purely political perspective, improvement means greatly increasing state and local rights over national and international rights and returning more political power to smaller groups and individuals who are more in touch with reality than the academic, business, and political elites of the nation and world.  Keep rewarding incompetence with no accountability, and you will only get more of it until there's some form of a lash-out public reaction, or a gradual decline into economic and ideological slavery.  That is what will come next.

Image: Lorie Shaull via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.