Some follow-up to my previous.

Derb — Both of you are right.
Your correspondent is right — there won’t be enough government jobs to go around, and the vast majority of people will need to find some practical work to keep themselves alive.
What it means is that government jobs will be incredibly difficult to get, requiring either a great deal of talent or powerful patronage or both.
What percentage of Imperial China were mandarins? [Between two and five percent at different times — JD] And didn’t every village family strive mightily to get their children into a position where they might possibly have a chance of being selected? Might this have something to do with the traditional Chinese ethic of hard work and education (and corruption)?

[Me] See p. 248 of WAD. Then I got this from my original correspondent:

John: I agree that history is on the pessimistic side of the argument … But the people who have been oppressed in the past have endured that oppression because they were forced to. These days people are much more mobile and more willing to uproot and move to the other side of the planet. Take both you and Mrs. Derb … as examples. So long as there is somewhere to go to, people will end up going.
And that’s the key to the whole thing. If our government is prepared to become as totalitarian as Soviet-era Russia and to ‘rebuild that wall’ then there is a chance that it will happen. But personally I think the genie of liberty is already out of the bottle. I don’t really believe that a truly totalitarian American government is a real possibility.
I do however think it’s quite likely that it will default on its foreign debt, inflate away its domestic debt, and become a second rate world power with a much lower standard of living. And in a scenario like that, all those government pensions are going to go unpaid.

[Me] Sorry, no sale. This is still too optimistic. The genie of liberty is no sooner out of the bottle than it’s trying to get back in. Many great thinkers have noted this sad fact about human nature: notable among them, Fred Reed and John Derbyshire.