An Efficient Way to Wreck the World

Only dark chocolate can save us now

It’s as if the regime in Washington has been raptured to some celestial paradise where the golf greens are glorious and every putter, every driver, every iron is made of solid gold, nothing plated. The left behind—the rest of us—are reaching for our phone every other minute in a race to keep up with the latest affront to the radiantly civilized nation we have loved. I learned only yesterday that the Wilson Center, a foreign policy think-tank, highly regarded for careful, sensible work, has been reduced to five people where before le deluge it was close to 130. Nor did I know until today that the Muskrats have gutted the National Endowment for the Humanities, created by Lyndon Johnson to keep learning alive in communities all over the country.

This is all part of the craze for efficiency that has loosed the Muskrats into America in a drive so fierce that nothing escapes their fanatical attention, not even the world itself. The White House stepped in to lead that final mile of fervent destruction with a fever of tariffs certain to re-rationalize global relations along lines both hostile and inhospitable alike to friends and foes, now about to be indistinguishable one from the other.

Take Switzerland. This mountainous favorite of many Americans has been hit with a 31 or 32 percent tariff —different departments of the regime have issued different numbers, according to the New York Times. I met a woman from Switzerland at a conference who, understandably irate, explained that this is due to an accounting error, not unusual for the federal SWAT tariffs teams any more than they are for the Muskrats who are madly efficient but not always accurate. U.S. News and World Report confirmed her compliant that the tariff squad failed to take into account the 192.9 tons of gold exported by Swiss authorities to the United States in January, up from 64.2 tons in December, 2024.

That was just one month. Shipments of gold from Switzerland to this country soared throughout all of last year. That’s because of concern that the tariffs to come might “affect gold deliveries.” The problem is that numbers people in Washington, if there are any left, didn’t take into account this extraordinary order for gold (very important to the top of the regime as has been pointed out earlier) and factored it unfairly into the new tariff. Without this error, the Swiss woman told me, it might have been closer to 18.

The truth is there is no more uncertainty, only calamity. Ronald Reagan used to tell us, “ We can trust the Communists to do exactly what they say.” Similarly, we can trust the leader of the current regime to do exactly what he says. Deportations coming? You bet. Tariffs on the way? Definitely. Why did anybody ever doubt it?

If you think it’s bad today, tomorrow will be worse, and the worst will continue to worsen far into the distance. Tariffs may be on again, off again, and vary in degree from day to day. But they are here to stay for now, in one form or another, The head Muskrat may have said in Italy that he hopes for a time when there will be free trade between the U.S.and Europe with no tariffs. Yeah. And somewhere over the rainbow blue birds fly. Why then oh why can’t I? We all know why.

As for efficiency, it’s highly overrated, at least in government. One of the most important books by the indispensable Jane Jacobs, now departed from this world, is Systems of Survival. In it she argues that there are two value systems in the world, the commercial system and the guardian system.

The first (that’s business, law and, to some extent, science) values honesty (necessary for contract law), efficiency, industriousness, thrift and dissent for the sake of the task—I can build something better. The second (government, military, religion) values loyalty (never leave a buddy injured in the field; if you promise to vote for a bill, do it) ), ostentation (elegant uniforms, vestments) largesse (a little pork greases the machinery of the state) and deceit for the sake of the task—you never announce your plans to ask another country to take out an adversary for you.

Mix up the value systems, wrote Jacobs, and you corrupt the enterprise. For instance, once a police station in New York rewarded its officers according to their productivity. All this accomplished was a rash of false arrests.

So while it’s bound to be helpful to rethink government operations from time to time, with an eye toward what you want to accomplish and how you plan to accomplish it. But the goal is not efficiency—leave that to corporations. The goal is the service for which that effort was created, and possibly, over the years, re-created.

If the goal in the current rage for efficiency is to fund extending the tax cuts of eight years ago, that is not an aim with widespread support, I suspect, and besides, the chainsaw massacre won’t raise enough money in any case. The obvious answer is to reign in the Muskrats and send their leader back to Austin to liquidate his automobile business, another casualty of the ill-fated enterprise called Doge—anybody remember that this is what the supreme leader in Venice was called for 1000 years?—and run Space X and Starlink, two of his more impressive efforts. Though undeniably weird and not at all likable, Musk is talented enough to overcome the spectacle he has had made of himself and set his course now toward more real accomplishment.

The rest of the country will have to endure the unendurable and think ahead with discipline, imagination and belief, in spite of everything, to the rebuilding of America and its long love affair with the wider world. As Goethe wrote: “You have shattered the beautiful world with a brazen fist…build it again within! And begin a new life, a new way…and play new songs.” But renewal begins within. Renewal is first a work of the heart.