🪓 We Got Rid of Our HR Team

“We got rid of our HR team.”

That’s not a quote from some edgy startup manifesto. That’s Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow — defending the elimination of his entire HR department, alongside layoffs affecting roughly 30% of his workforce. His accusation? HR was “creating problems that didn’t exist.”

Read that again. Creating problems that didn’t exist.

Because that is the oldest trick in the institutional playbook. If your department’s budget depends on having problems, you will never run out of problems.

The Incentive Trap

It’s a lesson about incentives — the kind that economics textbooks are too polite to teach properly.

Ryan Breslow put his finger on something universal: an HR department that measures its success by the number of policies it writes, the grievances it processes, the trainings it mandates. Remove the actual friction between people, and HR has nothing to do. So it manufactures friction.

It’s the same dynamic as a homelessness charity in Los Angeles whose funding depends on homelessness existing. Solve the problem, and you make yourself obsolete. A hospital that gets paid per procedure has an incentive to keep you sick. A police department measured by arrest numbers has an incentive to keep patrolling.

Follow the money. Follow the incentive. Everything becomes clear.

Thomas Sowell — God bless him — learned this in his twenties when he worked for the US government. He watched bureaucrats spend more time protecting their programmes than solving the problems those programmes were supposed to fix. In his own words, he realised that many people in government were “much more interested in keeping the job they have than in the goals that the job was supposed to serve.”

Sowell carried that insight his entire life. It shaped everything he wrote about race, housing, education, crime. Because once you see that the incentive structure matters more than the stated intention, you stop being fooled by noble language.

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” — Thomas Sowell

The HR department doesn’t want to solve conflict. It wants to manage it. Permanently. With flowcharts.

The World’s HR Department

But let me zoom out. Way out.

There’s a meme that’s been circulating for years:

America innovates. China replicates. The EU regulates.

It started as a joke. It’s stopped being funny because it’s basically true.

Look at the electric vehicle market. America built Tesla. China copied it, scaled it, and now dominates manufacturing. And the EU? The EU spent a decade writing regulations about what electric vehicles should look like, how they should be tested, and whether they should be allowed on the road at all.

Look at AI. America builds it. China adapts it. The EU writes an “AI Act” that nobody understands and everyone will end up breaking.

Look at crypto. America tolerates it. China bans it. The EU classifies it into seventeen categories and requires a passport.

The European Union — and by extension the UK that apes it — has become the world’s glorified HR department.

Its entire purpose is to identify risks, create committees, write guidelines, and slow everything down in the name of “protection.” It doesn’t build anything. It doesn’t make anything. It regulates things. It creates problems — “discrimination,” “data privacy concerns,” “algorithmic bias” — that didn’t exist until the regulators decided they needed to exist.

The City of London

Let me get specific.

The City of London — that tiny two-square-mile patch of real estate — accounts for roughly 70% of the UK’s GDP. And what does it do?

It moves money around. It creates financial instruments. It regulates other people’s money. It is, in Charles Murray’s phrase, a “bullshit jobs” economy scaled to a national level.

The City doesn’t make cars. It doesn’t grow food. It doesn’t build infrastructure. It sits in glass towers and generates PDFs about risk management, compliance frameworks, and ESG reporting. It is the HR department of the global economy.

And the whole British political class — left and right — is complicit. Because the City pays the taxes that fund the NHS, the schools, the pensions. The UK is addicted to its own bureaucracy the way a junkie is addicted to a fix.

“My people are fools, they do not know me.” — Jeremiah 2:10

Isaiah said it about Israel: “The leaders of this people mislead them.” (Isaiah 9:16) The prophets weren’t afraid to call out the ruling class. They called it what it was — a system that feeds on itself.

The Coming Reckoning

Here’s what I think is coming.

The same way Ryan Breslow looked at his HR department and said “we don’t need this anymore,” the major powers are starting to look at the regulatory state and see it for what it is.

Trump didn’t need another term to start the conversation about ripping up the regulatory code. The Americans are waking up to the fact that every regulation is a tax on innovation, and every compliance officer is a dead weight on productivity.

China doesn’t care about the EU’s regulations anyway. They’re building their own standards, their own supply chains, their own world. The Belt and Road Initiative is a giant middle finger to Western regulatory hegemony.

And the rest of the world? The Global South doesn’t want European rules. They want Chinese infrastructure and American technology. They want to skip the “regulate first, build later” stage entirely.

One day, the big boys are going to decide: we’re done playing HR.

We’re done with the committees. We’re done with the impact assessments. We’re done with the seventeen-page consultation documents about whether a drone should be allowed to deliver a pizza.

When that happens, the entire apparatus that the EU and the UK have built — the GDPR, the AI Act, the CBAM, the endless directives — will become irrelevant overnight. Like a department that discovers the problems it existed to manage have simply been declared irrelevant by the CEO.

“For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lᴏʀᴅ, as the waters cover the sea.” — Habakkuk 2:14

The world is accelerating. The foolish will drown in their own red tape. The wise will cut through.

What We Should Be Doing

I’m not just talking about business. I’m talking about the church too.

How many church staff positions exist to manage the church rather than serve the mission? How many committees meet to discuss the colour of the bulletins while the neighbourhood dies of spiritual death? How many pastors spend more time on safeguarding paperwork than on preaching the Word?

The early church didn’t have an HR department. It had apostles. It had elders. It had people who could actually do the job, not people who managed the people who might potentially do the job.

“Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lᴏʀᴏ, because you know that your labour in the Lᴏʀᴅ is not in vain.” — 1 Corinthians 15:58

Do the work. Not the paperwork. The work.

The world is changing faster than any regulatory body can track. The smart ones are stripping away the fat, firing the managers, and getting back to what actually matters.

Maranatha. Come, Lᴏʀᴅ Jesus. The clock is ticking, and the bureaucrats are running out of time.