- DOGE is DEAD…
- Efficient government is impossible…
- Can you imagine stock market wins 138 times bigger than Nvidia? If you’re like most people, probably not. But then again, most people haven’t seen this report.
Dear Reader,
Today I bear sad yet predictable — all too predictable — news.
The Department of Government Efficiency has died the death… eight months prior to its scheduled execution.
Yet no formal obituary came issuing.
It simply vanished into the great nothingness from which it sprang, unmentioned, unacknowledged and unmourned.
Director of the Office of Personnel Management Scott Kupor was asked about the agency’s status.
“That doesn’t exist,” came his terse response, head bowed in somber solemnity, his voice cracking.
It simply does not exist. And that is that.
A Futile Existence
Not even the agency’s inspiration and director, Mr. Musk, shed a pearl of sorrow in its memory.
Nor did he utter one tender word or mumble one single prayer.
What precisely did the Department of Government Efficiency accomplish in its brief, doomed existence?
The United States government took on an additional $2.1 trillion of debt since its January birth.
That reduces to $6.5 billion each and every day of its tortured existence.
Yet the abovesaid Kupor assured us that the agency’s demise was not in vain.
Its brief yet brilliant example will resonate throughout Washington… as cathedral bells might resonate throughout a city:
- But, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.
He added that federal agencies will “institutionalize” the changes DOGE made.
I hazard that DOGE will indeed be institutionalized.
Yet it will be institutionalized in the fashion that a lunatic is institutionalized.
It will simply be locked away and discarded.
I Predicted It
With the satisfaction of being proven correct — and with the disappointment of having been proven correct — this I wrote last November 15:
- President-elect Trump has tapped Elon Musk… upon the shoulder.
- [He] will direct the freshly constructed “Department of Government Efficiency.”
- Department of Government Efficiency? I fall from my chair, laughing at the very notion of it.
- As well erect a Department of Square Circles, a Department of Honest Lies, a Department of Sane Asylums.
- Not even a titanic dynamo like Mr. Musk can will the thing to success.
- Thus the Department of Government Efficiency is destined for the hellbox.
And into the hellbox it has gone, eight months early.
Why was I so certain of its inevitable failure?
The answer resides in the nature of government itself:
That is because the entire project was at war with itself.
As efficiency is natural to private enterprise, inefficiency is simply natural to government.
Inefficiency Is Inherent to Government
Once again I cite the late libertarian economist Murray Rothbard:
- The well-known inefficiencies of government operation are not empirical accidents… They are inherent in all government enterprise…
- There is a fatal flaw that permeates every conceivable scheme of government enterprise and ineluctably prevents it from rational pricing and efficient allocation of resources.
- Because of this flaw, government enterprise can never be operated on a “business” basis, no matter what the government’s intentions…
That “fatal flaw” is precisely what?
- It is the fact that government can obtain virtually unlimited resources by means of its coercive tax power…
- Private firms can get funds only from consumers and investors… Government, on the other hand, can get as much money as it likes…
- Government… has no requirement for meeting a profit-and-loss test of valued service to consumers, to enable it to obtain funds. Private enterprise can get funds only from satisfied, valuing customers and from investors guided by profits and losses. Government can get funds literally at its own whim.
Government Has no Skin in the Game
Yet with the highest respect, Mr. Rothbard, why must a wrench cost the Pentagon $5,000 or some other enormity?
Can we not demand efficiency in this example?
- Proponents of government enterprise may retort that the government could simply tell its bureau to act as if it were a profit-making enterprise and to establish itself in the same way as a private business.
- (But), it is impossible to play enterprise. Enterprise means risking one’s own money in investment. Bureaucratic managers and politicians have no real incentive to develop entrepreneurial skill… They do not risk loss of their money in the enterprise…
- [They] have no incentive to be efficient. In fact, the skills they will develop will not be the economic skills of production, but political skills — how to fawn on political superiors, how demagogically to attract the electorate, how to wield force most effectively.
- These skills are very different from the productive ones, and therefore different people will rise to the top in the government from those who succeed in the market.
Efficient Democratic Government Is Practically Impossible
Under democracy the concept of efficient government is especially preposterous.
Efficient government is possible — in theory — under a king or a dictator.
He can lower an axe upon the governmental apparatus if it pleases him. Who can prevent it?
But under democracy? Imagine for a moment all the competing demands on the system!
As I have written before: Think of all the parsnips that must be buttered.
The hard-luck farmer wants his back scratched. The hard-pressed businessman wants his belly rubbed. The overlabored teacher wants her apple.
Millions more are hard at the business.
All attempting to work the angles, to get a bucket in the stream, to get a snout in the trough… to catch a penny.
Elected officials must gratify them, else take the consequences.
How can such a governmental apparatus be efficient?
It is far easier to imagine it sunk under $38 trillion of debt.
When will you have government efficiency in the United States?
You will have it the precise instant ice skates become Hell’s primary transport.
Regards,
Brian Maher
for Freedom Financial News
