Just to see if I can penetrate the thick skull of someone used to “Chain of command”

See, in the military, there is a hierarchical chain of command by which only the immediate superior of an individual can give a person a command and that person can only pass that command down one level. That is, of course, a gross oversimplification of the process, I’m sure plenty of people will come along and “Set me straight” on this, but I am of the opinion that this is generally if not specifically accurate.

Thankfully, the world is not the military, though there are plenty of parallels.

Let’s say for example Ralph Gotrox has a huge mansion. He hires Billy Bobs mansion Maintenance Company to take care of it.

Billy Bob farms everything out. He’s actually just a figurehead and spends most of his time on a beach in Jamaica, his nephew Ray Bob actually runs the business
Ray Bob maintains many mansions, so he has a team of housekeepers that clean all of them. He also has a team of roofers, because mansions have roofs that need maintaining, and it takes a lot of people. there are also tuckpointers and snowplowers and groundspeople.

One of the groundspeople is Juan’s mean and green. Juan mows a lot of lawn, but he never sees a blade of grass, he has five teams of actual groundskeepers. One of his teams is led by a guy named Jesus who everyone calls Chuy. Chuy has three mowers, a trimmer, and one guy who is especially good with flowerbeds. The flowerbed guy’s name is Andre.

Andre is out in the front of billy Bob’s mansion, carefully deadheading the roses. Who does he work for?

No, not Chuy. Chuy is just his immediate superior, but if Chuy wasn’t there then Juan could just as easily tell him what needs doing. So is it Juan? Why the fuck would Juan tell him what to do unless Ray Bob told him what he wanted done? So is Ray Bob the boss? Fuck no. Ray bob doesn’t give a flying rats ass about that bedamned rosebush, and would leave it alone except for the orders he received from Billy Bob, who, on his beach in Jamaica, is too damned drunk to give a shit. No, the boss, the customer, is Ralph Gotrox. In any employment hierarchy the employer and the employee are the only two elements that can not be removed from the equation. the man who pays for the work, and the person who does it. The only reason the intermediaries exist is convenience- and the same is true of our government. because as individuals we didn’t want to have to ALL deal witht he teachers on the school board and ALL have to negotiate with US steel for the material to build a battleship. We as taxpayers have, over the years, created a hierarchy that allows us to accomplish all the myriad tasks of operating a nation, but somewhere along the way, the hierarchy got the impression that IT was in charge and forgot the real employer- the one who pays the bills. This is not a motivational poster, it is an unassailable fact. Any other attitude is not merely wrong, it is actively evil.

Professor Hale has shown himself to be a reasoning and moderately efficient steward of the resources for which he is entrusted. otherwise I wouldn’t even have this conversation. The fact that he has bought the “You’re not the boss of me” party line is distressing because he is one of the good ones. Imagine what the real scumbags are like. And the core of the problem with the government- the whole nation, in fact- is that people think their boss is just the person that can fire them. And we, as the providers of the currency, have had that ability forcibly removed from us in almost all cases. it is rarely the elected officials that are the major problem, but the mass of bureaucrats who are insulated against reprisal for incompetence.

Once again: The employer and the employee are the last two people in the equation when everything else has disappeared. the one who pays, and the one who gets paid; the one who needs the work done, and the one who does the work. Everyone else is just a parasite or a bureaucrat.