And the fact that he faces no downside is exactly what makes him reckless in the first place. Of course, you could be hoping that he totals your car so you can get the insurance payout!

The arch-Technocrats in Washington, DC have bonded themselves to our government apparatus in a way that creates multiple and persistent moral hazards that consistently favor Technocrats. In some cases, it gives them plausible deniability for their actions.

This paper will examine some of the multiple moral hazards that currently exist.

War has always served as the crucible of state power. Conflict has reliably expanded the reach of centralized authority, accelerated the deployment of experimental technologies, and normalized emergency governance structures that outlast the emergencies that created them.

What is different today is that the beneficiaries of war are no longer simply generals and munitions makers. They are data scientists, AI engineers, surveillance architects, and the venture capitalists who fund them. The moral hazards embedded in this new arrangement are not incidental. They are structural. And they serve, whether by design or consequence, the advancement of Technocracy. Moreover, the Technocrats have been egging bureaucrats on to make a cover for their own agenda.

Technocracy replaces political judgment with algorithmic management, the substitution of data for deliberation, and the elevation of efficiency above liberty. War, it turns out, is its most reliable incubator.

Hazard I: The Emergency Permission Structure

The first moral hazard begins with emergency itself. Under the Defense Production Act of 1950, the federal government possesses broad statutory authority to compel contract terms, redirect production capacity, and override normal commercial and legal protections when national security is invoked. In peacetime, that authority sits largely dormant, subject to political scrutiny and constitutional challenge. In wartime, it becomes a governing instrument of extraordinary reach. The companies most willing to abandon their own stated ethical commitments are rewarded with the most lucrative contracts in the world, while those who resist are not merely passed over — they are designated threats to the supply chain. That is not a market. It is coercion wearing the mask of procurement.

When the Pentagon recently designated a major AI company a national security supply chain risk for refusing to remove prohibitions on mass domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal targeting from its contract terms, it was not enforcing a law. It was sending a message to every other technology firm in the ecosystem: compliance is not optional, and the price of conscience is exclusion.

The moral hazard is not difficult to see. Once war conditions exist, the emergency permission structure converts ethical resistance into institutional liability. The incentive gradient runs entirely in one direction — toward the fullest possible deployment of the most powerful surveillance and targeting systems available, with the fewest constraints the market can be pressured to accept.