In the “Hunger Games,” a governmental enclave, “the Capitol,” rules a post-apocalyptic America divided into administrative units called “Districts.” The self-contained, distant Capitol isolates and plays one district off against another as it reduces their citizens to serfdom and enriches itself. Survival in the districts comes down to currying favor with the government, struggling to survive one’s beleaguered role or betraying restive neighbors to authorities. Districts sacrifice their children to the Hunger Games, a grinding reminder of their debased lot.

Without benefit of apocalypse, America serves a similarly self-contained governmental enclave — “the Beltway.” Its elected regime isolates and plays one American group off against another. Its policies work to reduce free citizens to dependent wards of the state while the Beltway enriches itself. We sacrifice our children’s future to the Beltway’s doubling of the national debt.

The engine of America’s misfortune lies in the proliferation of the Beltway’s unelected bureaucrats. They exist, in their various departments, as an autonomous fourth branch of government, answerable to no one, free from meaningful challenge, correction or dismissal.

Those bureaucrats, under the current regime, have acted with impunity to sell guns to Mexican drug cartels, comb through public emails and phone calls, abandon brave men in Benghazi, squelch legitimate political action, spend half a billion dollars on a useless website and close down open air memorials.

Thanks to the lapdog media and the bureaucratic equivalent of “omerta,” no measure will likely be had of the malfeasance, corruption and cowardice of America’s Beltway.

Leonard Hoy, Greenwood