But should anyone who works for a living be sobbing – or cheering?

Consider the one inarguable difference between an apparatchik and a worker: The latter must earn his living, meaning he must persuade others that his work has value. He has no power to force anyone to pay him. This means the work he does must be considered worth doing by the people who pay him to do it. This is honest work – whatever form it takes – because no one is forced to pay for the work.

Now consider the apparatchik.

This is a person who takes his living, via force. Because people are forced to deal  with such people – as for example at the DMV. What they have to offer almost no on wants but everyone is forced to pay for, regardless.

Would the DMV remain a going concern were it not for the force? Would "customers" – as the DMV obnoxiously describes the people forced to queue up for "services" they don't want much less need – continue to queue up were they not forced to queue up?

How about the legions of apparatchiks recently fired by the president? How many would collect a check were it not for the force?

The apparatchik pretends, of course, that he is like honest people and is just getting paid. He personally has not shoved a pistol under the chin of anyone. It does not mean that what he takes was not taken by the threat of exactly that by some other party. All it allows is for the apparatchik to evade the knowledge that he is both a thief and a parasite – as well as a coward. One lacking the honesty of a tick sucking the blood of a dog directly and unashamedly.

Attending their moral cowardice is an appalling sense of haughty entitlement. That they are owed a living by those forced to provide it.

The apparatchik inverts the sound relationship of the free market in which people owe only when they contract a debt, as for services rendered. Services they choose to avail themselves of that are of value to them.

I recently paid an electrician to help me sort out a problem with the generator panel in my house. He came to my house because I asked him to come – and he came because he agreed to come. No force was involved on either side. I then agreed – happily – to pay the man for his time and expertise because both were worth paying for. He did not have any power to coerce me to pay and – more to the point – coercion was unnecessary, because I wanted to pay him for his services.