By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, February
24, 2025
One of the irritating things about DOGE—something that
ought to bother conservative DOGE apologists more than it should—is the comprehensive
lack of honesty in the thing. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency
is not a department, it is really only quasi-government at most, and its aim is
not efficiency. It is the right-wing mirror image of those “diversity” offices
whose aim is the enforcement of homogeneity and conformity. George Orwell (I
hope he is pleasantly surprised by his position in the afterlife) is somewhere
laughing his immortal ass off.
The dishonesty is compounded by secrecy. For example, we
probably should know who is in charge of the project. There is a person
calling himself or herself the ”DOGE administrator” who signs off on paperwork,
but no one outside of Musk’s little circle knows who this person is. The only
thing the
White House will say is that it is not Elon Musk—which means, of course,
that it is Elon Musk de facto if not Elon Musk de jure. (Trump says
Musk is in charge, contradicting his own people.) People who smile
admiringly and pronounce that Trump and Musk just don’t “play by the old rules”
ought to think a little bit, if they still can, about what it is they are
smiling at.
It isn’t efficiency.
If government efficiency were the end being sought, that
would require something the Trump administration and its sycophants have
typically avoided: work. Fundamentally restructuring federal agencies
and programs requires lawmaking—it is not a task that can be accomplished in
any meaningful or durable way through administrative action alone. And such
projects are a great deal of work—organizational drudgery and political work,
the negotiations that Donald Trump claims to be a master of in contravention of
most of the available evidence.
To take an informative example: In the immediate
post-9/11 era, there was a push to make our national-security and intelligence
agencies more effective by removing interagency barriers and consolidating
bureaucracies. The result was the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security, which has been partially successful in achieving the goal of its
creation. The aim was not to save money, but to make the agencies use their
budgets to more effectively pursue their objectives, which is, of course, what
efficiency really means.
The people shouting “Defund the police!” a few years ago
had a plan that would have reduced spending on law enforcement, but that would
not have been efficient—it would have been idiotic. Efficiency is not
measured by a budget line—it is measured by the budget line plus the relevant
performance metric. I do not think that many of us—even us cranky
libertarians—would object to larger education budgets, for example, if those
larger budgets produced commensurate improvements in educational outcomes. As
any competent corporate manager knows, simply reducing expenditures often is
not at all useful in improving business outcomes—including profitability—and,
while I am
deeply committed in my conviction that everybody who says “We ought to run
government like a business!” out to be punctured with something blunt, in this
case the broad principle is the same.
The problem with health care and education and the
intelligence services isn’t that we spend too much money on them but that we do
not get what we want to get for the money we spend. The trains in Switzerland
are a lot more expensive than the ones in India, but I prefer the Swiss trains
and suspect that many others would, too. (If they can afford them—there’s the
rub.) Or you could do things the way Metro North and the New York City subways
do, combining European levels of expense (more, in fact) with developing-nation
standards of quality and performance. (New York City subway construction costs
about 10 times as much, and sometimes even more than that, than similar
European projects in countries such as Spain, which is not famous for its
efficiency.) McDonald’s could save a lot of money out-of-pocket by eliminating
most of its employees or serving (even) lower-quality food, but neither of
those would actually be good for its business. Penny wise and pound foolish and
all that.
About business regulation, I once
observed that the dumbest assistant manager of a McDonald’s knows a lot
more about managing his McDonald’s than the smartest regulator in Washington.
But Hayekian knowledge problems apply to business endeavors, too. The
difference is that markets, when they are allowed to work, are pretty effective
when it comes to telling the people at Coca-Cola that nobody likes New Coke. As
I wrote to a hypothetical ephebic regulator:
It’s not that there shouldn’t be
any regulation. It’s just that we have to keep our expectations excruciatingly
modest, because you, Mr. Smith, are not going to be very good at it. But you’re
what we’ve got. You don’t know what to do, the elected guys sure as hell don’t
know what to do, the whole econo-politico-epistemological deck is stacked
against you, and Lloyd [Blankfein; this was post-financial crisis] is dealing.
It’s Lloyd’s deck. Common sense is not going to get you through this,
and you do not have adequate information to make decisions in the public
interest. Nobody does. But here’s the thing: Betamax and the Arch Deluxe
and Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo (seriously, that existed) just get
yanked off the shelves when hordes of people don’t buy them, and the great big
milling laboratory of the marketplace tells Joe Businessman, who is really a
research scientist seeking social value, to shelve that particular
hypothesis and maybe not expect a bonus this year. But there’s no feedback
mechanism like that in government, which means that when you do stupid,
you do immortally stupid. You might find yourself asking why Alabama has
a law against having an ice-cream cone in your back pocket at any time or
chaining your alligator to a fire hydrant. (What was the precipitating episode
there, Bubba?) You get Americans in the 21st century still paying the temporary
emergency telephone tax to fund the Spanish–American War (1897–98). On and
on it goes. Forever. Deathless stupidity tends to accrete and clog up the
system, over time, and Washington is a factory whose workers produce deathless
stupidity like it’s their job, like they’re getting paid for it. Because it
is. Because they are.
We free-market types have spent many years arguing that
the government does a poor job of trying to run businesses that bureaucrats do
not know much about, especially considering the abundance of perverse
incentives and lack of good ones influencing the regulatory endeavor. As I
wrote above: This is not an argument against all regulation, but an argument
for modest expectations. Elon Musk and DOGE now oblige us to examine the other
side of that coin, which has rarely been looked at because it is rarely relevant:
Business tycoons are apt to do as bad a job when it comes to managing and
reforming regulatory agencies and other bureaucracies as those regulators and
bureaucrats do when trying to steer complex business endeavors by remote
control.
It is obvious that Musk and his disreputable little
gaggle of pudwhacking throne-sniffers simply do not know what they are doing:
For example, they ordered
the dismissal of a bunch of federal employees who were “on probation”
because they seem to have thought that this probationary condition was
disciplinary rather than a formality related to those employees being new
hires. Employees with stellar evaluations were fired in emails that cited their
supposed performance problems. In one case a reader passed along, an
administrator promoted to a manager position because of his excellent work in a
subordinate role was dismissed because he was “on probation” in his new role.
Many similar situations have been reported. Ignorance is the natural state of
mankind, and most of us will forever be ignorant about most subjects—economists
call this “rational ignorance,” which reflects the fact that there is not much
reason to learn a great deal about things that do not matter much to you in the
near term or foreseeable future and about which you do not have, and never will
have, much control or influence. Ignorance can be rational—arrogance rarely
is.
Musk and his army of angry nerds have a duty—a
professional and patriotic obligation—to be less stupid than they have
been. They are creating chaos and damaging worthwhile government programs while
simultaneously complicating and pre-discrediting future reform efforts—the ones
that will, one hopes, be led and executed by people who can bother to do a little
bit of the homework before they start running amok like a bunch of
psilocybin-addled maniacs while being led by an actual
psilocybin-addled maniac.
And while the habit of personalizing politics ought to be
generally resisted, it is worth noting here that Elon Musk is a foreign-born
entrepreneur with complex links to
foreign governments, self-reported psychiatric problems, and a complicated
drug habit. He is not famous for his honesty or personal integrity. He is
working, in effect, in secret, with no real oversight or mechanism of
accountability.
Historically speaking, Musk has not been exactly a
free-market man: Many of his businesses have been government-oriented and
subsidy-seeking. (Musk became
skeptical of EV subsidies right about the time they started to help Tesla’s
competition more than Tesla.) But he knows enough to know how the market
mechanism works (which is in a fashion analogous to evolution) to improve
products and industries, and that the absence of competitive pressure (leading
to product death and firm death) in government means that bad ideas in the
public sector can be very long-lived—very nearly immortal.
What he is engaged in right now is only vandalism
directed at Kulturkampf ends, but the damage being done will not be very
easy to undo, and the precedent being set will last, if not forever, at least
until there is a new administration at some point in the future with aims and
values that are very different from those of the Trump administration, which
under Musk’s influence is creating new weapons to be used by irresponsible
demagogues—by other irresponsible demagogues—in ways that will be
surprising and horrifying. On top of the damage Musk et al. are doing right
now, we should take account of the damage that will be done by others with the
present innovations.
A well-governed polity runs on broad, consistently
applied rules. We’ve had decades of ad-hocracy, and now we have ad-hocracy on
ketamine, which is not a great improvement even if it has a jollier affect.
Economics for English Majors …
… with an emphasis on the English this week. I recently
had a conversation of a kind that will be familiar to many of you. Anonymous
Jones remarked that we Americans probably work too much and should spend more
time with our families. I concurred, but added that American work habits are
not an arbitrary corporate imposition but an aspect of a complex, organically
evolved system of production and consumption, and that this cannot simply be
rearranged according to the aesthetics and personal sensibilities of would-be
social managers. (I’m tons of fun at parties, really.)
Jones’ smugly offered response to all that was: Well,
then, maybe we should consume less and be happy with that. Harrumph, etc. To
which I added: But you aren’t talking about consuming less—you are talking
about consuming more, in the form of leisure time. Jones: We shouldn’t classify
spending time with your family as consumption—what kind of monster are
you?
And, there it is.
There is a tendency to put the word “mere” in front of
rhetoric, as though rhetoric were somehow tawdry or disreputable. I am in the
rhetoric business—at least in part—and I was once a teacher of rhetoric, and,
from that point of view, I value rhetoric. Rhetoric, intelligently and
ethically employed, can help people to understand complicated realities and
think through them. (There are some oh-so-worldly Washington types who will
roll their eyes at the notion that there are ethical concerns touching rhetoric,
as though a mentally normal adult could not tell the difference between putting
one’s best foot forward and telling a lie.)
But rhetoric is not the right tool for non-rhetorical
jobs. In economics, people often bristle at calling things what they are:
“Don’t you dare call Social Security an entitlement—I have a right to
those benefits.” (Indeed, you do—one might say you are entitled to
them.) Calling spending time with your family and friends (leisure is the
common economics term) consumption may make it feel low or unworthy to some
people, because that puts it in the same category of things as ordering a pizza
or buying a pair of sneakers or going to a movie—but consumption doesn’t
actually have a moral quality of its own. You can buy a copy of Penthouse
or a copy of City of God, and both are consumption.
How do we know leisure time is consumption? Think of it
this way: Imagine a little village in which everybody labors on identical
schedules, working 12 hours a day, sleeping eight hours a day, and enjoying the
other four as leisure, to spend time with family or read or paint watercolors
or play checkers or
whatever. And now imagine that some genius comes along with a technological
innovation that allows the village to maintain its same level of economic
output while working only eight hours a day, making the new arrangement: eight
hours of work, eight hours of sleep, eight hours of leisure. The people of the
village are better off and—since my hypothetical village is a free-market sort
of village—they have a choice about how they want to realize those gains: They
can enjoy more leisure or they can work more and raise their material standard
of living. They can exchange an hour’s leisure for an hour’s work or decline to
do so, which is, economically, the same as exchanging an hour’s work for an
hour’s leisure.
Economics is not some magical master discipline of social
life, but economics is really, really useful for answering a particular kind of
question—economic questions. Rhetoric is not at all useful for answering
economic questions—it is useful for intentionally obfuscating what the question
is, which is what dishonest people (including those who don’t exactly mean to
be dishonest) use it for. I place a very high value on music and think that a
life without music would be impoverished, but I wouldn’t try to use music to
deal with a problem of forensic accounting or structural engineering or law.
You may have heard the famous maxim: “Writing about music is like dancing about
architecture.” I don’t think that is exactly right (Jay Nordlinger
writes beautifully and usefully about music) but I sympathize with the notion:
You want the right analytical tool for the job.
It doesn’t matter to the economic questions whether we
call capitalism capitalism or call it something else, whether we call
Social Security an entitlement or a social-insurance scheme, whether we’re
comfortable choosing the non-derogatory British sense of “scheme” over the
derogatory American sense, whether we
call something “rent seeking” or “corporate welfare” or “tapeworming,” etc.
None of that matters very much when it comes to dealing with economic dilemmas,
and we shouldn’t waste our time pretending that it does.
Words About Words
I beat up on my
friends at National Review a little bit over their not-very-good-at-all
DOGE editorial. But the piece started off as a rant about my irritation
with the “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” cliché. In addition
to being banal, the phrase is almost always used dishonestly—as a way of
asserting, without quite arguing, that the defects in a particular way of doing
things do not justify existing criticism of that method. E.g., Fay Johnson writing
in the New York Times, incompetently, about online moderation:
I’ll be the first to acknowledge
that no moderation system is perfect. I’ve sat in rooms where we have debated
where to draw the line, knowing that to catch most harmful content we would
also inadvertently remove innocent posts. Moderators can be unsure whether a
satirical post crosses the line into hate speech or if a post expressing
earnest concern about vaccine efficacy has veered into misinformation. There is
no universal consensus on what constitutes “harm,” and without careful
calibration of policies and the machine-learning models trained to enforce
them, mistakes happen.
But we cannot let the perfect be
the enemy of the good.
This is an excellent example of the kind of intellectual
dishonesty I mean. No one ever insisted that Facebook or Twitter have a
moderation system that is “perfect,” and they were not criticized for failing
to meet the standard of perfection. The question was not whether the perfect
should be the enemy of the good but whether what they had was, in fact, any
good. The answer, broadly, is that it wasn’t. Partisanship, bias, and giving in
to every idiotic voguish political mandate that a Bryn Mawr sociology student
could dream up did more harm than good. We are seeing, in part, the results of
that today.
To take the go-to example, efforts by online platforms to
suppress the New York Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in
the runup to the 2020 presidential election were not imperfect—they were
corrupt. They were not intended to protect the truth but to protect Joe
Biden’s political interests. They were not aimed at mitigating harm, unless
“harm” is defined as anything that might hurt the electoral prospects of
Democratic office-seekers or further the political interests of Donald Trump.
As loathsome as Trump and his sycophants are, that is not a very good
definition of the public interest, harm, or safety. Nobody thinks that Amazon
banned Ryan Anderson’s book on transgender controversies because it is dangerous—Amazon
is now
selling the book, and the book is the same book it was six months ago. The
thing that has changed is the political environment.
The problem is not that—oh, the weaselly
language—“mistakes happen.” The problem is that what happens isn’t a mistake at
all but an intentional program of suppressing views because they are unpopular
and disliked by the people who have the power to suppress them. This is why we
get lectures about rigorous standards of scientific evidence from newspapers
that publish horoscopes and every manner of “wellness” quackery and
flim-flammery. It is not a question of truth or falsehood—it is a question of
what, and whom, the little
suppressors dislike.
This is not a case of allowing “the perfect to be the
enemy of the good.” It is a case of bad actors doing bad things for bad
reasons. The fact that Johnson and her Times editors refuse to deal with
that head-on is why they enjoy so little public trust.
In Other Wordiness …
As a political matter, tax cuts
simply are not a top priority for the American people broadly, the working
class that now forms the core of the Republican coalition nor even the
Republican Party itself.
Not … nor doesn’t really work. What you want is neither
… nor: “Tax cuts are a top priority neither for the American people broadly
nor for the working class.”
The analysis found that v-Fluence
was “not subject to the GDPR”, but recommended v-Fluence handle “EU personal
data consistent with the requirements of the GDPR in the event the Regulation
is deemed to apply”, the company said in a statement. One of the
recommendations was removing the profiles, the company said.
v-Fluence will continue to “offer
stakeholder research with updated guidelines to avoid future misinterpretations
of our work product”, according to the company statement.
Capitalize the first word in a sentence, even when that
word is part of a proper noun that is usually styled lowercase. You may write bell
hooks or e.e. cummings or iPhone in the middle of a sentence,
but at the beginning of one, capitalize the first word. The fundamental
conventions take priority over specific eccentricities—to capitalize at the
beginning of a sentence is not to change the way e.e. cummings styles his name
but simply to write formal English as formal English is written. Bell hooks may
have hated semicolons (hypothetically) but that wouldn’t have any bearing on
whether a sentence about her should have semicolons in it.
In Closing
The Trump administration is, as expected, incoherent and
self-contradicting. But if it has an identifiable throughline right now, it is
this: The Trump administration acts consistently in accord with Moscow’s
interests, even where these conflict with American interests. I recommend to
you James Kirchick’s latest, in the New
York Times:
Since the onset of the Cold War
80 years ago, American presidents of both parties have understood the necessity
of a Germany reliably rooted within the Western alliance. From West Germany’s controversial
rearmament in the early 1950s to the deployment of American Pershing
missiles on German soil three decades later and the rallying
of support for Ukraine today, the possibility of the European Union’s most
populous country’s adopting a position of strategic neutrality, of “equidistance”
between America and Russia, has been a perennial concern. For the United States
to put its considerable clout behind a German political party whose leaders
minimize Nazi crimes, portray their country as a victim of scheming outsiders
and parrot talking points from the Russian Foreign Ministry would be a blunder
of historic, and potentially catastrophic, proportions.
One way of looking at this is that Trump et al. simply
prefer to serve Russian interests. They prefer men such as Putin to men such as
Zelensky, and would prefer a United States that more closely resembles Russia
to one that more closely resembles Ukraine. Another way—more plausible, in my
view—is that this is what happens when a weak man who doesn’t know what he
believes encounters a ruthless man who knows what he wants. Trump’s
subordinance to Putin is instinctual. Americans may not notice this, because Americans
are not inclined to notice that kind of thing. But the rest of the world is
noticing. Weakness is provocative—and one shudders to think what it is that
Trump’s weakness will provoke.
No comments:
Post a Comment