At the Economic Club of New York, President Trump announced: “I will create a Government Efficiency Commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government — and making recommendations for drastic reforms.” Elon Musk is eager to get involved with the project. In one fell swoop, every other reason for re-electing Donald Trump took a back seat to the tantalizing possibility of turning his second term into an Office Space sequel. How America Was Lost: ... Best Price: $5.35 Buy New $2.99 (as of 10:30 UTC - Details)
No government since the Byzantine Empire has been in more desperate need of immediate downsizing. Can you picture the billionaire boys putting on their “efficiency expert” hats and shearing the bloated federal workforce one incompetent functionary at a time? Commissioner Musk: “So what is it that you would say you do here?” Crickets. President Trump: “You’re fired. Bring in the next one.” If that’s all those two did for four straight years, round two of Trumpalooza would be a colossal success.
Most of the federal blob is dead weight. Its chief purpose is to hook so many families on a federal paycheck that tens of millions of Americans will never stop voting for its continuing expansion. Even worse, it’s a Janus-faced monstrosity with internally conflicting mission objectives. We’ve got departments dedicated to fomenting wars abroad and departments dedicated to stopping them. We’ve got agencies tasked with confiscating taxpayers’ income and agencies tasked with providing economic relief. Committees are organized to study “problems,” but those problems can’t be officially solved because doing so would mean that committee-members are out of jobs. That possibility becomes the only “problem” that needless federal workers decide to solve, and they “solve” it by doing absolutely nothing. The end result is that an unknowable number of ghost programs dedicated to issues that arose decades ago are still bouncing around the bureaucratic ether for no other reason than to keep the federal blob paid and happy. There’s probably some group out there still ostensibly studying whether the popularity of compact cassette tapes will adversely affect the 8-track cartridge industry — and still probably another group filing seasonal reports on the likelihood that 8-track will end demand for cassette tapes! It’s madness.
Hoppe Unplugged: Views... Buy New $9.95 (as of 06:27 UTC - Details) The whole mess reminds me of an underrated cinematic gem from the ‘80s called Pascali’s Island. In that pre-WWI period piece, Sir Ben Kingsley plays a spy for the Ottoman Empire on a small Greek island filled with foreign emissaries from other crumbling empires. For decades, Kingsley’s Pascali has written copious reports for the Sultan detailing all of the suspicious activities taking place in the area. Although he is paid regularly for his services, he has never once received a reply. He concludes that he was long ago lost in the bureaucratic system and that his life of espionage for a dying empire has been meaningless. How many Pascalis currently work for the U.S. government? How many mandarins file meaningless reports that never get read and receive regular payments from some holdover account established by a long-forgotten appropriation bill from another era? Do all empires commit suicide by drowning in a sea of their own red tape?
Even worse than all the federal driftwood, of course, are all the federal apparatchiks who actually take their sinecures seriously! Better to have a million Pascalis being paid for nothing than a single Jack Smith who thinks he’s entitled to incarcerate the Republican nominee for president while hiding the ongoing crimes of the imperial Deep State! Anyone who needs a lesson in the corrupting influences of power need only interact with someone from the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Transportation Security Administration, or any other bureaucratic busybody interested only in taxing you, regulating your behavior, or patting you down before you board a plane. Unless you bend over when ordered and promptly cough up everything you’re told you owe, some other faceless-but-all-powerful bureaucrat throws your name on a list. You definitely don’t want to be put on any mysterious list! The regime enforcers at the Fascist Bureau of Intimidation just love to wake up people on lists in the dead of night. And they don’t knock.