I went down a rabbit hole on the history of the US civil service, after reading a Teddy Roosevelt biography. It was surprising to see just how corrupt/archaic

I went down a rabbit hole on the history of the US civil service, after reading a Teddy Roosevelt biography. It was surprising to see just how corrupt/archaic the then system was, by modern standards. But yet the country still functioned. My takeaway was that the existence of the civil service at all, rather than its particular virtue, dominated value. There's benefit from even a pretty corrupt one!