In March of 2021, the FBI conducted a raid of a company called U.S. Private Vaults located in Beverly Hills, California. The company offered safe deposit boxes to clients seeking privacy and security. Banks have rules about what can be kept in their safe deposit boxes and often require disclosure of the contents. This company did not place such restrictions on their clients. As a result, it was assumed its clients were criminals or people who would like to circumvent government surveillance.

For this reason and no other reason, the FBI got a warrant to inspect the company’s records, presumably to confirm that criminals were using the service. The legality of this was not questioned by the judge who signed off on the warrant because judges no longer question warrant requests from agents of the state. The FBI could hand a judge a drawing of stick figures in fingerpaint, claiming it is surveillance video of criminal activity and the judge would accept it.

Putting that aside, the warrant made no mention of opening the safe deposit boxes or inspecting the contents for criminal activity. On the day of the raid, the special agent in charge of the raid ordered his agents to pry open the boxes, inventory the contents, bring in drug sniffing dogs to sniff the contents and collect fingerprints from the boxes and the inside of the facility. Then the FBI decided to seize tens of millions in property on the grounds that they could do it.

At this point, the FBI had produced no evidence of a crime. They were probably right that criminals would like to use such a service to hide cash, valuables they bought for money laundering purposes and other things. It would also be attractive to foreign nationals working on behalf of a foreign government. Mossad, for example, could use a company like this as a dead drop. Space aliens could also use it to hide their ray guns and the keys to their flying saucer.

Again, there was never any evidence of wrongdoing. The FBI lied to the court about their intensions, and they willingly violated the law when they decided to not only pry open the boxes, but also steal the goods inside them. The owners of the stolen property sued the FBI to get back their property. The court initially ruled in favor of the FBI because the courts are almost as corrupt as the FBI. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the lower court’s decision.

In its ruling, the court called the raid an egregious violation of the owners fourth amendment rights. They also noted that the FBI clearly intended to steal the contents so they could use what they found in order to go after other people, perhaps raid other private security services in a similar fashion. The government tried to settle the case before it reached this point, suggesting they knew they had willingly violated the law, but they hoped to avoid the court making it official.

Presumably, the FBI will return the property to the owners, but the owners will have to sue the government in order to get back the cost of having to litigate this in federal court for the last three years. The government will probably settle so as to avoid another potential court loss, but the harm can never be fully cured. The company went out of business and who would trust a similar company in the future? If the secret police can willy-nilly raid a private business, what is the point of the service?

More importantly, none of the people involved in this raid from the government side has faced any punishment. The agent who ordered the raid was not fired. The agents and lawyers who lied to the court to get the warrant were not fired. There will be no criminal charges brought against any of these people, despite the fact they committed some of the worst abuses of power in our system. The Ruby Ridge and Waco cases tell us that the agents involved here will get promoted.

In the managerial state, no one is ever held accountable because accountability requires two elements missing in managerialism. One is a moral duty to the stated goal of the institution. If the people inside the FBI were motivated by an aristocratic spirit, the agents involved would all resign for having shamed their leaders. If they had a republican spirit, they would resign for having shamed the institution. Instead, they have a managerial spirit, which means no shame is possible.

The other element for accountability is clear responsibility. Managerialism is primarily about shifting responsibility from individuals onto collections of managers with a shared interest in controlling the organization. It is the magic trick of managerialism that collective error is never the fault of anyone in the collective. Managers socialize failure onto the abstraction that is the system, while privatizing the benefits onto the individuals within the managerial system.

This is why reform of managerialism is impossible. Reform starts by holding people responsible for the results. Managerialism evolved to prevent this so the reformer is either repelled by the system or consumed by it. This is why public companies that fail must be taken private. Elon Musk bought Twitter, took it private and became the man responsible for the company. He then fired half the staff and started holding the rest accountable for their work. He overthrew the managerial system.

Of course, this means the large social systems that control American society will never be reformed either. Everyone in Washington knows the FBI is a disaster, but no one can be held accountable, so not one tries to hold anyone accountable. This means the managerial state will follow the arc of all public companies in that it will reach its end phase and either collapse entirely or be taken private, as in private rule, so the system can be scrapped along with the managers.

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